6 ms·

Currently, the thing the journals do do is act as stewards for the peer review process, and it is in their interests to not publish whatever kind of crap might

by lutorm 15y ago

Currently, the thing the journals do do is act as stewards for the peer review process, and it is in their interests to not publish whatever kind of crap might be submitted. If we go to publishing everything on the web, someone needs to perform this function or it will be even more difficult to sort through the flood of stuff that is written. That said, this should be pretty cheap since they only need the scientific editor to do this, so a "journal" that only publishes on the web may have a viable (but perhaps not lucrative) business model funding itself purely on page charges.

Dove 15y ago
I find it hard to believe the current system -- a secret scientific sanity check by a couple of people -- is the best we can do as far as gatekeeping in this day and age. I would much rather see original research managed OSS style -- published directly to communities of interest, critiqued and discussed openly, with revisions and explanations and discussions and raw data and source code and everything in all its ugly glory right there with it. There is a temptation under the current system to regard the contents of journals as absolute truth on account of their curation behind closed doors. We used to feel that way about newspapers, too. The truth is that credibility comes in degrees, and it's much safer to be able to see the guts of the operation.
- adamjernst 15y ago
  There's a thin line here. On one hand, you're right that openness is a good thing. On the other hand, modern science is incredibly political. When millions of dollars of funding is on the line, tensions run high. Anonymity is one way to shield reviewers. But the only way to have workable anonymous review is a trusted gatekeeper—and those are expensive.
- lutorm 15y ago
  I absolutely don't think that the current system means that the contents of journals are absolute truth -- I've been a referee and seen what happens to rejected articles (they show up a month later in another journal). The point is not so much about the quality of what does come out, it's about the quality of the crap that currently does not come out. While I agree that it could be useful to have open discussions about papers, I think if that happens at the expense of the ability of everyone who thinks they have an idea to put stuff out there, the result might be a net decrease in signal/noise.
- jackpirate 15y ago
  People propose that plan all the time. Here's why it can't work: While programmers like coding, researchers hate writing (they like doing research!). While there are relatively few OSS projects, there are millions of research papers (yes, millions! http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&b...) There are wiki style projects out there for each major domain. For example, quantum computing has http://www.quantiki.org http://www.quantiki.org. These sites are great, but they will never replace journal articles because they do not handle history or citations well. Imagine if all we had was wikipedia to tell us about the Church-Turing hypothesis? Papers like that give us an insight into the scientists' mind that nothing else can.
  - forkandwait 15y ago
    It works now in physics: arxiv.org The reason it works is that your peers read your work, and either refute or cite you. Remember -- everybody knows everybody in a subfield, or at least everybody's advisor. It helps when there is math involved which is either correct or not. If somebody random submits something to arxiv, people know they don't know him or his grad school and that is thus probably a crackpot and so don't bother to read it (except sometimes someone from nowhere gets a result, which would NEVER be seen in the closed peer review process). EDIT: Also you attach your name to a finished product, not an unattributed ongoing wiki page. Your reputation is everything, so you win or lose based on the articles. One of the problems in social science academia is that 98% of the articles are completely worthless, and they only serve to get a professor promotion based on an index of citation times journal prestige. The smaller state colleges require their junior faculty to "publish", but they don't have enough to say to get into real journals and the publishing houses fill the need with "Journal of Rural Sociology" etc.
    - jackpirate 15y ago
      IANA Physicist, but I can't imagine any physics journals feel threatened by arxiv. When someone wins a Nobel prize for work that was published exclusively through arxiv, then you might have a point.
- vacri 15y ago
  OSS aims for pragmatism Science aims for truth While there's a lot of overlap, there's a fundamental difference between the two, and methods to pursue pragmatism are not necessarily the right methods to pursue truth
forkandwait 15y ago
No, academics who volunteer to review and edit are the stewards. The free journals have a cheap website and do all the work by email and some LAMP stack (EDIT:) maintained by a classified staff programmer to the tune of 25% FTE -- this is CHEAP, and the expensive part (the profs) do the work for free. The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough. Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers. (It's a warped system.)
- Loic 15y ago
  The system is slowly "unwarping" itself, at least in Europe. The big universities are slowly publishing all the articles they produce. For example, DTU in Denmark: http://orbit.dtu.dk/app http://orbit.dtu.dk/app (not all the articles are available as pdf, the policy to have them as pdf too is slowly applied). Also, as a researcher, when somebody is asking you for your paper, just send it. In all the cases I really needed a paper and was unable to get it for free, I contacted the author and got it. Even better, it makes you in contact with the author and can lead to collaboration down the line. Old school networking with groups and circles, it works very well...
  - ez77 15y ago
    Old school networking with groups and circles... You mean Google Circles! Sorry, I've been brainwashed...
p4bl0 15y ago
Effectively, this doesn't seems to ruin them, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224: Elsevier 2010's profit is 724,000,000₤ (and that's only 46% of the group's total adjusted operating profit).

by lutorm 15y ago

Dove 15y ago

I find it hard to believe the current system -- a secret scientific sanity check by a couple of people -- is the best we can do as far as gatekeeping in this day and age. I would much rather see original research managed OSS style -- published directly to communities of interest, critiqued and discussed openly, with revisions and explanations and discussions and raw data and source code and everything in all its ugly glory right there with it. There is a temptation under the current system to regard the contents of journals as absolute truth on account of their curation behind closed doors. We used to feel that way about newspapers, too. The truth is that credibility comes in degrees, and it's much safer to be able to see the guts of the operation.

adamjernst 15y ago
There's a thin line here. On one hand, you're right that openness is a good thing. On the other hand, modern science is incredibly political. When millions of dollars of funding is on the line, tensions run high. Anonymity is one way to shield reviewers. But the only way to have workable anonymous review is a trusted gatekeeper—and those are expensive.
lutorm 15y ago
I absolutely don't think that the current system means that the contents of journals are absolute truth -- I've been a referee and seen what happens to rejected articles (they show up a month later in another journal). The point is not so much about the quality of what does come out, it's about the quality of the crap that currently does not come out. While I agree that it could be useful to have open discussions about papers, I think if that happens at the expense of the ability of everyone who thinks they have an idea to put stuff out there, the result might be a net decrease in signal/noise.
jackpirate 15y ago
People propose that plan all the time. Here's why it can't work: While programmers like coding, researchers hate writing (they like doing research!). While there are relatively few OSS projects, there are millions of research papers (yes, millions! http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&b...) There are wiki style projects out there for each major domain. For example, quantum computing has http://www.quantiki.org http://www.quantiki.org. These sites are great, but they will never replace journal articles because they do not handle history or citations well. Imagine if all we had was wikipedia to tell us about the Church-Turing hypothesis? Papers like that give us an insight into the scientists' mind that nothing else can.
- forkandwait 15y ago
  It works now in physics: arxiv.org The reason it works is that your peers read your work, and either refute or cite you. Remember -- everybody knows everybody in a subfield, or at least everybody's advisor. It helps when there is math involved which is either correct or not. If somebody random submits something to arxiv, people know they don't know him or his grad school and that is thus probably a crackpot and so don't bother to read it (except sometimes someone from nowhere gets a result, which would NEVER be seen in the closed peer review process). EDIT: Also you attach your name to a finished product, not an unattributed ongoing wiki page. Your reputation is everything, so you win or lose based on the articles. One of the problems in social science academia is that 98% of the articles are completely worthless, and they only serve to get a professor promotion based on an index of citation times journal prestige. The smaller state colleges require their junior faculty to "publish", but they don't have enough to say to get into real journals and the publishing houses fill the need with "Journal of Rural Sociology" etc.
  - jackpirate 15y ago
    IANA Physicist, but I can't imagine any physics journals feel threatened by arxiv. When someone wins a Nobel prize for work that was published exclusively through arxiv, then you might have a point.
vacri 15y ago
OSS aims for pragmatism Science aims for truth While there's a lot of overlap, there's a fundamental difference between the two, and methods to pursue pragmatism are not necessarily the right methods to pursue truth

forkandwait 15y ago

No, academics who volunteer to review and edit are the stewards. The free journals have a cheap website and do all the work by email and some LAMP stack (EDIT:) maintained by a classified staff programmer to the tune of 25% FTE -- this is CHEAP, and the expensive part (the profs) do the work for free. The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough. Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers. (It's a warped system.)

Loic 15y ago
The system is slowly "unwarping" itself, at least in Europe. The big universities are slowly publishing all the articles they produce. For example, DTU in Denmark: http://orbit.dtu.dk/app http://orbit.dtu.dk/app (not all the articles are available as pdf, the policy to have them as pdf too is slowly applied). Also, as a researcher, when somebody is asking you for your paper, just send it. In all the cases I really needed a paper and was unable to get it for free, I contacted the author and got it. Even better, it makes you in contact with the author and can lead to collaboration down the line. Old school networking with groups and circles, it works very well...
- ez77 15y ago
  Old school networking with groups and circles... You mean Google Circles! Sorry, I've been brainwashed...

p4bl0 15y ago

Effectively, this doesn't seems to ruin them, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224: Elsevier 2010's profit is 724,000,000₤ (and that's only 46% of the group's total adjusted operating profit).