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> I'm glad my university paid for it. Does the journal pay for the academics’ time in reviewing articles? No. Does it pay for the articles themselves? Also no.

> I'm glad my university paid for it. Does the journal pay for the academics’ time in reviewing articles? No. Does it pay for the articles themselves? Also no. What service, exactly, is the university paying all that money for? It seems to me that the core service journals offer is as a central place for people to submit articles. And some organisation around requesting and collecting reviews. And that sounds like the sort of thing you could replace with a website. The workflows we use for modern software development (eg on GitHub) are far more complex, maximally automated and free. And the result is source code anyone can browse, without needing any of the code to have its copyright handed over to a rent seeking middleman. It’s crazy that academics of all people live in such a primitive ecosystem.

krastanov 5y ago
The editors of good journals (APS Physical Review Letters for instance) provide significant service and it is reasonable to pay for it: from simple things like significantly improving the quality of the prose and typesetting to more crucial stuff like properly moderating the review process (picking appropriate reviewers, controlling for conflict of interest, filtering out superfluous submissions).
version_five 5y ago
I think you're missing the point. Researchers literally could upload their work to github if they wanted to right now. They choose to publish in journals because the reputation means their work will get seen and will have credibility with other researchers. It's a bit like Big-4 auditing in a sense. They don't do anything particularly special, but their size and reputation give credibility to their audits that wouldn't otherwise be possible. And like journals, they have had some spectacular failures that are dwelt upon, but in general they make vetting much easier.
- indrax 5y ago
  They're paying for credibility, but assigning the credibility to an organization instead of an open and understood process of vetting. This confuses me.

krastanov 5y ago

The editors of good journals (APS Physical Review Letters for instance) provide significant service and it is reasonable to pay for it: from simple things like significantly improving the quality of the prose and typesetting to more crucial stuff like properly moderating the review process (picking appropriate reviewers, controlling for conflict of interest, filtering out superfluous submissions).

version_five 5y ago

I think you're missing the point. Researchers literally could upload their work to github if they wanted to right now. They choose to publish in journals because the reputation means their work will get seen and will have credibility with other researchers. It's a bit like Big-4 auditing in a sense. They don't do anything particularly special, but their size and reputation give credibility to their audits that wouldn't otherwise be possible. And like journals, they have had some spectacular failures that are dwelt upon, but in general they make vetting much easier.

indrax 5y ago
They're paying for credibility, but assigning the credibility to an organization instead of an open and understood process of vetting. This confuses me.