3 ms·

Journals became more and more obsolete with the rise of Internet and only managed to retain their position in the academic world due to their citation metrics s

Journals became more and more obsolete with the rise of Internet and only managed to retain their position in the academic world due to their citation metrics system that is used to judge academic worth and the enormous amount of articles that they've amassed over the last centuries and that academics need access to. I think it will take at least another 30 years until we will be able to stop relying on closed-access journals, possibly longer since there are still countless high-profile articles that only get published in those journals (though some universities and funding agencies changed their policies to demand that results of publicly funded research are freely available). In Physics and many other fields Arxiv.org has basically replaced journals as the primary way of getting the latest research results. Unfortunately many high-impact-factor journals like Nature forbid you to publish a preprint of your article there (at least that was the case in 2012) so that they can defend their claim of publishing "cutting-edge" results only (which due to their long review processes are often 12 months old by the time they're actually published). The most ridiculous thing is that the journals today do little more than act as an intermediary between the authors of a paper and the reviewers, which work for free and are colleagues from the same field. That and maybe styling the papers a bit, which is (IMHO) unnecessary in most cases as the source LaTeX version usually provides very good design already.

speedplane 8y ago
There are certainly problems with journals, but they do provide one benefit: they are a source of trust. If you read something in a major publication, you can trust it more than if it was just posted to a website. With the internet, reliable sources of trust are becoming more important, not less. I'm not condoning the current extremely expensive journals that prohibit access to the public, but a completely open model where anyone from anywhere can post anything isn't the answer either.
- ThePhysicist 8y ago
  What creates trust is (IMHO) not the journal but the peer review process, and I think we can find a way to do that without invoking a middleman. Arxiv.org already started doing this and I'm confident that a community-managed review system will easily be able to beat the journal's current systems in quality, speed and reliability. It works in other domains (see e.g. Wikipedia, Stackoverflow) so why shouldn't it work in the academic world?
  - speedplane 8y ago
    The peer review process is certainly a very large component to creating trust, but it's not just the process that's in place at the moment, it's the past track record and reliability. An untrustworthy source cannot instantly turn into a trustworthy one by adding quality peer review, it needs to develop a track record, which takes time. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It has only relatively recently become seen to be trustworthy, after many of years of tweaking and improving their edit process. When Wikipedia first started, few took it seriously. Likewise, when an open journal starts adding more stringent publication requirements, it too will not be immediately trusted. The point is that quality itself is not sufficient. You need a reliable level of quality over a relatively longer period of time.
- username90 8y ago
  > If you read something in a major publication, you can trust it more than if it was just posted to a website. I'm not sure that is true, I've studied a fair bit of statistics and I can usually find flaws in most social science studies I read. So I trust an article combined with a few hundred HN comments a lot more than I trust anything published in scientific journals without comments, since usually if something is wrong someone in the comment section will find it. Even on reddit if you wade through it you can usually find some nitpickers adding good discussion on articles with a few hundred comments.
  - asdff 8y ago
    There is still a much lower acceptance rate at a good journal than a bad journal that might accept anything and everything that is to the page limit. You might still get a faulty paper of course, but large journals have the benefit of choosing.
richardhod 8y ago
A good way to deal with the issue is for reputable academics in a field to start new journals, and do all the work they did for the old paid ones for free, but this time for a free end-product. This exists: I know of one that's been going a decade or more, hosted and started at USC, and there are probably a lot more. Even better, to support this, have an open-source freeware Journal CMS and publishing system for academics to use as a plug and play solution.

speedplane 8y ago

There are certainly problems with journals, but they do provide one benefit: they are a source of trust. If you read something in a major publication, you can trust it more than if it was just posted to a website. With the internet, reliable sources of trust are becoming more important, not less. I'm not condoning the current extremely expensive journals that prohibit access to the public, but a completely open model where anyone from anywhere can post anything isn't the answer either.

ThePhysicist 8y ago
What creates trust is (IMHO) not the journal but the peer review process, and I think we can find a way to do that without invoking a middleman. Arxiv.org already started doing this and I'm confident that a community-managed review system will easily be able to beat the journal's current systems in quality, speed and reliability. It works in other domains (see e.g. Wikipedia, Stackoverflow) so why shouldn't it work in the academic world?
- speedplane 8y ago
  The peer review process is certainly a very large component to creating trust, but it's not just the process that's in place at the moment, it's the past track record and reliability. An untrustworthy source cannot instantly turn into a trustworthy one by adding quality peer review, it needs to develop a track record, which takes time. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It has only relatively recently become seen to be trustworthy, after many of years of tweaking and improving their edit process. When Wikipedia first started, few took it seriously. Likewise, when an open journal starts adding more stringent publication requirements, it too will not be immediately trusted. The point is that quality itself is not sufficient. You need a reliable level of quality over a relatively longer period of time.
username90 8y ago
> If you read something in a major publication, you can trust it more than if it was just posted to a website. I'm not sure that is true, I've studied a fair bit of statistics and I can usually find flaws in most social science studies I read. So I trust an article combined with a few hundred HN comments a lot more than I trust anything published in scientific journals without comments, since usually if something is wrong someone in the comment section will find it. Even on reddit if you wade through it you can usually find some nitpickers adding good discussion on articles with a few hundred comments.
- asdff 8y ago
  There is still a much lower acceptance rate at a good journal than a bad journal that might accept anything and everything that is to the page limit. You might still get a faulty paper of course, but large journals have the benefit of choosing.

richardhod 8y ago

A good way to deal with the issue is for reputable academics in a field to start new journals, and do all the work they did for the old paid ones for free, but this time for a free end-product. This exists: I know of one that's been going a decade or more, hosted and started at USC, and there are probably a lot more. Even better, to support this, have an open-source freeware Journal CMS and publishing system for academics to use as a plug and play solution.