Academic publication is a long process with unclear value for our organization. We don’t currently see the primary target audience for this being the broader academic audience. This might be something we consider in the future.
I think formal academic peer-review by experts in the relevant fields could potentially improve the accuracy and overall quality of your work (not that I think it’s of low quality; I’ve been pretty impressed overall, but I’m also no expert myself). You might also just be able to reach out to academics for review, if you’re not already doing that. There are several academics and researchers at other organizations (e.g. in animal behaviour/cognition, economics, philosophy) who I’d imagine are sympathetic, and could be open to reviewing work.
Biorxiv has a new initiative where they will review preprints, with the idea of the review comments then being published next the pre-print and then used by directly editors of the journal(s) the paper is later submitted to. I don’t know too much about this, but it could be a useful way to get reviewer comments for some of invertebrate sentience posts, even if you don’t later intend to submit them to a journal. Some further information is at:
Also, it may be worth considering that in many cases preprints are considered much more ‘citeable’ in academic articles than general webpages/blog posts would be. I think having the DOI is seen as a mark of permanence, which is considered superior to just having a permalink to the accessed version.
I’ve asked several academics with domain expertise to review draft posts, or sections of posts, or advise on specific issues. Some have been very useful, but they understandably do not have time to engage fully (if at all). As a consequence, I often worry that I’m making dumb mistakes, or just reinventing the wheel, and there are often substantial delays while waiting for expert input. I think the lack of access to academic networks and infrastructure is perhaps the biggest weakness of RP as a research organisation, and it is related to the youth and inexperience of EA as a whole.
I’m not sure it can be fully solved – some fields only have half a dozen people in the world working on them, so it may be impossible to find someone with enough free time to help out. But I suspect a lot of progress could be made, e.g. I bet there are a lot of statisticians and economists who would be willing and able to help if only they knew we needed it. At the mid- and late career professionals’ meetup at EAG San Fransisco last June, it was suggested that retired academics, professional groups, and LinkedIn might be good sources of mentors/advisors. Someone mentioned https://taprootfoundation.org/ as well – perhaps not for academic advice, but for support in other areas where EA orgs tend to be lacking, such as management. I’d be interested to see an effort to systematically connect experts with EA projects, perhaps through the EA Hub or 80,000 Hours.
It sounds like you’re thinking mostly about the animal sentience research, where I know there has been a lot of engagement with outside academic experts, but fwiw the empirical studies I work on also received a lot of external review from academics. They are very overlapping in method and content with my academic work (indeed, one of these projects is an academic collaboration and the other was an academic project I had been working on previously, that I decided made more sense to do under Rethink Priorities) and also a lot of the researchers in the EAA have backgrounds as academic researchers, so it’s quite easy to find relevant expertise.
Thanks for the response! I guess I personally am interested in it, because I think it would lend credibility to WAW outreach projects to be able to cite it.
Academic publication is a long process with unclear value for our organization. We don’t currently see the primary target audience for this being the broader academic audience. This might be something we consider in the future.
I think formal academic peer-review by experts in the relevant fields could potentially improve the accuracy and overall quality of your work (not that I think it’s of low quality; I’ve been pretty impressed overall, but I’m also no expert myself). You might also just be able to reach out to academics for review, if you’re not already doing that. There are several academics and researchers at other organizations (e.g. in animal behaviour/cognition, economics, philosophy) who I’d imagine are sympathetic, and could be open to reviewing work.
Biorxiv has a new initiative where they will review preprints, with the idea of the review comments then being published next the pre-print and then used by directly editors of the journal(s) the paper is later submitted to. I don’t know too much about this, but it could be a useful way to get reviewer comments for some of invertebrate sentience posts, even if you don’t later intend to submit them to a journal. Some further information is at:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/bid-boost-transparency-biorxiv-begins-posting-peer-reviews-next-preprints
https://www.cshl.edu/transparent-review-in-preprints/
Also, it may be worth considering that in many cases preprints are considered much more ‘citeable’ in academic articles than general webpages/blog posts would be. I think having the DOI is seen as a mark of permanence, which is considered superior to just having a permalink to the accessed version.
I’ve asked several academics with domain expertise to review draft posts, or sections of posts, or advise on specific issues. Some have been very useful, but they understandably do not have time to engage fully (if at all). As a consequence, I often worry that I’m making dumb mistakes, or just reinventing the wheel, and there are often substantial delays while waiting for expert input. I think the lack of access to academic networks and infrastructure is perhaps the biggest weakness of RP as a research organisation, and it is related to the youth and inexperience of EA as a whole.
I’m not sure it can be fully solved – some fields only have half a dozen people in the world working on them, so it may be impossible to find someone with enough free time to help out. But I suspect a lot of progress could be made, e.g. I bet there are a lot of statisticians and economists who would be willing and able to help if only they knew we needed it. At the mid- and late career professionals’ meetup at EAG San Fransisco last June, it was suggested that retired academics, professional groups, and LinkedIn might be good sources of mentors/advisors. Someone mentioned https://taprootfoundation.org/ as well – perhaps not for academic advice, but for support in other areas where EA orgs tend to be lacking, such as management. I’d be interested to see an effort to systematically connect experts with EA projects, perhaps through the EA Hub or 80,000 Hours.
It sounds like you’re thinking mostly about the animal sentience research, where I know there has been a lot of engagement with outside academic experts, but fwiw the empirical studies I work on also received a lot of external review from academics. They are very overlapping in method and content with my academic work (indeed, one of these projects is an academic collaboration and the other was an academic project I had been working on previously, that I decided made more sense to do under Rethink Priorities) and also a lot of the researchers in the EAA have backgrounds as academic researchers, so it’s quite easy to find relevant expertise.
Thanks for the response! I guess I personally am interested in it, because I think it would lend credibility to WAW outreach projects to be able to cite it.