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The good ones are indeed pretty good filters. I'm not smart enough nor free enough to verify that a study is good, is important, is free of errors -- and so I b

by pen2l 6y ago

The good ones are indeed pretty good filters. I'm not smart enough nor free enough to verify that a study is good, is important, is free of errors -- and so I benefit from the service provided by, say, Nature Photonics in knowing that whatever I'm reading is important, significant in some manner, and interesting. Good journals have a high bar for writing and diagrams. In order to understand things, it helps that they're communicated clearly. You're likely not going to find incomprehensible poorly written text or hard-to-understand figures in Science or Cell journal. As an example, I encourage you right now to go to https://science.sciencemag.org/ https://science.sciencemag.org/ to see their coverage of covid-19. You'll get better cutting-edge information and perspective on the issue than anywhere else.

p0llard 6y ago
Ah, but that distinction was made by the reviewers, who are (in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases) unpaid; the publisher itself isn't providing that as a service, at least as far as I understand.
- pen2l 6y ago
  Frankly the only problem I see in this grand situation is the part about reviewing. But what I see as being the problem is something different: my problem is that it's rigged. I.e., do you know that when you submit to Nature, you can specify to whom your paper should and should not be sent to for review? This encourages back-hand deals. Invariably, one tends to suggest their old pals, and naturally those pals show the journal two glowing thumbs being up and tell them to send it straight to the presses, with a cute little remark that this or that figure should maybe be made more clear. I remember talking to a colleague about this about 5 years ago, the reviewers should not be anonymous, for various reasons: a) they should be recognized for their diligent work of verifying things, b) there should be some motivation to play a straight game, some element of accountability: perhaps the knowledge that you stand as the person who okay'd something that might prove later to be suspect is good enough motivation to play it clean. And as it happens, some big journals are beginning to try this policy out! I hope and think this takes over in most places.
  - p0llard 6y ago
    > I.e., do you know that when you submit to Nature, you can specify to whom your paper should and should not be sent to for review? It's the same in e.g. ACM conferences; indeed there is a developing scandal surrounding organised fraud in ACM/IEEE conferences (conferences are more prestigious than journals in CS, unlike other fields) facilitated by this very mechanism. The reviewers themselves are not really anonymous are they? In general I think it's usually pretty well known who the reviewers for a given journal/conference are, even if this isn't explicitly published. The papers themselves are usually anonymised, but that's a different matter, no?

by pen2l 6y ago

p0llard 6y ago

Ah, but that distinction was made by the reviewers, who are (in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases) unpaid; the publisher itself isn't providing that as a service, at least as far as I understand.

pen2l 6y ago
Frankly the only problem I see in this grand situation is the part about reviewing. But what I see as being the problem is something different: my problem is that it's rigged. I.e., do you know that when you submit to Nature, you can specify to whom your paper should and should not be sent to for review? This encourages back-hand deals. Invariably, one tends to suggest their old pals, and naturally those pals show the journal two glowing thumbs being up and tell them to send it straight to the presses, with a cute little remark that this or that figure should maybe be made more clear. I remember talking to a colleague about this about 5 years ago, the reviewers should not be anonymous, for various reasons: a) they should be recognized for their diligent work of verifying things, b) there should be some motivation to play a straight game, some element of accountability: perhaps the knowledge that you stand as the person who okay'd something that might prove later to be suspect is good enough motivation to play it clean. And as it happens, some big journals are beginning to try this policy out! I hope and think this takes over in most places.
- p0llard 6y ago
  > I.e., do you know that when you submit to Nature, you can specify to whom your paper should and should not be sent to for review? It's the same in e.g. ACM conferences; indeed there is a developing scandal surrounding organised fraud in ACM/IEEE conferences (conferences are more prestigious than journals in CS, unlike other fields) facilitated by this very mechanism. The reviewers themselves are not really anonymous are they? In general I think it's usually pretty well known who the reviewers for a given journal/conference are, even if this isn't explicitly published. The papers themselves are usually anonymised, but that's a different matter, no?