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I strongly disagree, and I think the disagreement probably is because we're in two different fields (biology vs CS). I think journals should be open access and

I strongly disagree, and I think the disagreement probably is because we're in two different fields (biology vs CS). I think journals should be open access and non-profit. However, I also think they exist, and they should be tiered. This is how scientists indirectly communicate the importance of a work to the public and to the news media. A lay-person can quickly grasp that a Nature or eLife or PLoS Biology paper is considered more trustworthy by the scientific community than a random blog post. It's a system that is far from perfect, but it does have predictive power for determining what the scientific community thinks of a work without having to be an expert. This is arguably the single most important utility in science communication, where it is essential that the scientific community is able to communicate updates on issues like climate, GMOs, vaccines, genetics, conservation biology, and evolutionary biology. These are all extremely important issues on which in some ways scientists are already losing the communication battle. If communicating science loses its journal hierarchy, loses pre-publication peer review, all of the pseudoscientists and charlatans and extremist think-tanks will jump on the chance to spew out paper after paper to confuse the public, and confuse journalists. They will engage 24-7 in "debate" about these papers on twitter and blogs, and probably win against scientists because pseudoscientists have more time, resources, and experience convicing people. Some scientists seem to think this is a silly hypothetical, and can't imagine that Ted Cruz could ever write something that looks like a scientific paper. Nothing is further from the truth. I encourage you to look up Answers In Genesis "research journal", a creationist website, and see if a lay-person could quickly distinguish any of those papers from real science (they can't). Climate denialists write equally long and convicing articles on blogs like Climate Audit and Watts Up With That. It takes high levels of domain expertise to debunk these works, or to understand why they're wrong. A world without a hierarchy of journals with pre-publication peer review is a world in which 99.9% of people become unable to determine high-quality pseudoscience from science. We should be making these systems stronger, by improving peer review within the scientific community, by establishing a more rigid and formal hierarchy of publications, not by encouraging communication anarchy. Because we will lose communication battles to pseudoscientists without journals.

nkurz 9y ago
A world without a hierarchy of journals with pre-publication peer review is a world in which 99.9% of people become unable to determine high-quality pseudoscience from science. And what do you think the numbers are now, in the current world with pre-publication peer review? You make a beautiful argument (genuinely) but I think it overlooks some of the most important criticisms of the current approach. Yes, it's almost universally accepted that ideas published in a high ranking journal have a strong correlation with consensus of those within the field the journal represents. The criticism though is about what happens in the (presumably rare) cases where the consensus of the field is wrong. If the decisions of what to publish are made only by those invested in the status quo, how does a field self-correct rather than allowing errors to accumulate? How can one from the outside distinguish between a true-scientific field where this happens, and a pseudo-scientific one where it does not? It's a hard question without clear answers, but almost certainly it can't be done by relying only on the opinion of the experts within the field in question. Using your very appropriate Ted Cruz example, it's worth remembering that credentialism plays to his strengths: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz). He was a debate champion at his undergraduate Princeton, and then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, where he was the primary editor of the Harvard Law Review. These are highly respected institutions, and association with them would generally would convince a lay-person this person is not an idiot. Imagine that he's set up a system of peer review with a group of equally bright but ideologically biased peers, and is trying to argue that anything published without the approval of this group should be ignored as the work of "pseudoscientists and charlatans and extremist think-tanks". Irrespective of the truth of this claim, it wouldn't be a very convincing argument to anyone who didn't start out agreeing with it.
matwood 9y ago
The problem is that locking good research behind paywalls certainly does not help win the communication battle. Schools and grant givers need to stop relying on publishing in a prestigious journal as a criteria for being a good researcher. I agree that proper, rigorous science needs to be marked as such, but the closed journals are part of the problem and not the solution.
- 9y ago

nkurz 9y ago

A world without a hierarchy of journals with pre-publication peer review is a world in which 99.9% of people become unable to determine high-quality pseudoscience from science. And what do you think the numbers are now, in the current world with pre-publication peer review? You make a beautiful argument (genuinely) but I think it overlooks some of the most important criticisms of the current approach. Yes, it's almost universally accepted that ideas published in a high ranking journal have a strong correlation with consensus of those within the field the journal represents. The criticism though is about what happens in the (presumably rare) cases where the consensus of the field is wrong. If the decisions of what to publish are made only by those invested in the status quo, how does a field self-correct rather than allowing errors to accumulate? How can one from the outside distinguish between a true-scientific field where this happens, and a pseudo-scientific one where it does not? It's a hard question without clear answers, but almost certainly it can't be done by relying only on the opinion of the experts within the field in question. Using your very appropriate Ted Cruz example, it's worth remembering that credentialism plays to his strengths: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz). He was a debate champion at his undergraduate Princeton, and then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, where he was the primary editor of the Harvard Law Review. These are highly respected institutions, and association with them would generally would convince a lay-person this person is not an idiot. Imagine that he's set up a system of peer review with a group of equally bright but ideologically biased peers, and is trying to argue that anything published without the approval of this group should be ignored as the work of "pseudoscientists and charlatans and extremist think-tanks". Irrespective of the truth of this claim, it wouldn't be a very convincing argument to anyone who didn't start out agreeing with it.

matwood 9y ago

The problem is that locking good research behind paywalls certainly does not help win the communication battle. Schools and grant givers need to stop relying on publishing in a prestigious journal as a criteria for being a good researcher. I agree that proper, rigorous science needs to be marked as such, but the closed journals are part of the problem and not the solution.

9y ago