4 ms·

What kind of support? All I've heard is that they take free labor and add their brand to it so they can charge to distribute it.

probably_wrong 9y ago
It depends a lot on which discipline are we talking about - a computer science journal is nothing like a biology one. Having said that, the requirements to publish in a good journal are quite high - reviewers will point out mistakes, demand more data if yours is not convincing enough, point out related literature that you might have missed, and so on. The journal will also check that the reviewers are not simply friends of the author. It can take about a year to get a journal article published. After seeing some of the stuff that gets submitted (and rejected), I don't feel I can trust research that has not been peer reviewed. A good journal ensures that a minimum standard of quality is met, and that I'm not building my research on lies and fluff pieces.
Fomite 9y ago
A few kinds of support: Non-publishing: Some of these journals provide genuine monetary support for their sponsoring society, which then go to fund travel scholarships, put on conferences, etc. Publishing: This will depend highly on the field - a lot of people who assert that journals add nothing come from fields where LaTeX is the standard format journals are submitted in, so journals don't do much in the way of formatting. But this is not all fields. Most of my papers (I'm in a Word-standard field) get page layout, and a page layout I find significantly more pleasant to read than most LaTeX documents. I've also had my papers get fairly strong copy editing, and I already carefully copy edit my papers. I've seen some other papers that have definitely been much improved by the editorial staff. In at least one paper, I had a figure redone by them in the journal's style.

4 ms·

What kind of support? All I've heard is that they take free labor and add their brand to it so they can charge to distribute it.

by godzillabrennus 9y ago

probably_wrong 9y ago
It depends a lot on which discipline are we talking about - a computer science journal is nothing like a biology one. Having said that, the requirements to publish in a good journal are quite high - reviewers will point out mistakes, demand more data if yours is not convincing enough, point out related literature that you might have missed, and so on. The journal will also check that the reviewers are not simply friends of the author. It can take about a year to get a journal article published. After seeing some of the stuff that gets submitted (and rejected), I don't feel I can trust research that has not been peer reviewed. A good journal ensures that a minimum standard of quality is met, and that I'm not building my research on lies and fluff pieces.
Fomite 9y ago
A few kinds of support: Non-publishing: Some of these journals provide genuine monetary support for their sponsoring society, which then go to fund travel scholarships, put on conferences, etc. Publishing: This will depend highly on the field - a lot of people who assert that journals add nothing come from fields where LaTeX is the standard format journals are submitted in, so journals don't do much in the way of formatting. But this is not all fields. Most of my papers (I'm in a Word-standard field) get page layout, and a page layout I find significantly more pleasant to read than most LaTeX documents. I've also had my papers get fairly strong copy editing, and I already carefully copy edit my papers. I've seen some other papers that have definitely been much improved by the editorial staff. In at least one paper, I had a figure redone by them in the journal's style.