3 ms·

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 t

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.

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.