Academic journals aren’t anything close to a lost cause. The real problem is that they are *too* profitable. So no one bothers to dream up other ideas. 🧵.

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But, in the meantime, if you’re looking for this type of lay-academic translational writing, you will find it on academic blogs and newsletters. These are a labor of love, and need all the support they can get. So here’s mine:

If @NateSilver538 wants better research reporting for a general audience, the answer is simple: . He should make his own *translational* journal, and actually pay experts to write well for it.

Pay them to read the dense technical papers and provide a clear, expert-based explanation of what it says & why it matters, or summarize potential problems with the work and why it might not move our understanding forward.

Anyone with the money to do so could *easily* find hundreds of willing and highly-skilled PhDs to hire to provide expertise in understanding academic research in any field they want.

And, what’s more, there are thousands of PhDs who aren’t in academia, either because there aren’t simply enough academic jobs or because they are more interested in translational work.

But there clearly is an audience out there that wants good, clear, technically-correct jargon-free writing explaining the work of academic researchers, and why it matters.

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Writing well for a general audience is very unlikely to help anyone get tenure, and tenure is how academics stay employed in academia. So there is no incentive for academics to fix the problem Nate is concerned about.

In fact, writing clear, translational papers can be viewed as a mark *against* an academic. Clear, understandable work is often interpreted as “simplistic” and looked down upon.

Why? Because that’s not part of their job. There’s no funding for it, there’s no prestige or reputation that accrues from it, and there’s simply no time to spend on it.

But @NateSilver538 *is* right about one thing: there is a major communication gap in translating academic research to journalists, industry, and interested lay people. This gap *is* a problem. But academics aren’t going to solve it.

Jargon, thus, facilitates communication *between* academics within a field. Which is the *purpose* of academic publishing. It is not a problem to be solved.

Jargon exists because it allows academics to be highly exact and technical, with a minimum amount of explanation. Jaron is also highly stable across time (although not, necessarily, across fields!). Lay language can change much quicker!.

Communication *within* an academic field is the life-blood of academics. That’s what makes it different from a bunch of people just sitting around thinking or tinkering in their garage. It is a *collective* endeavor, and communication is how we ensure that.

The use of field-specific jargon, which seems to be a big part of what Nate is complaining about here, is actually a key part of ensuring the continuing intelligibility of the work to future scholars.

Which is to say, academic journals exist for academics to communicate with each other. Across space and across time. And these journals still do work for this purpose (despite the increasing amounts of fakery and slop).

So they don’t care if *you* want to read the articles. They only care if *academics* need to read them.

But many people don’t understand how that can be true. The answer: they are essentially B2B. Their main customer base is universities, and other large library systems.

Academic publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry, and the largest publishers have profit margins of 40%. These companies are not in danger of failing any time soon. They’re simply too powerful.