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I really like this idea. It has a major strength as a boycott -- it just involves me refusing to do work which I would not have been paid to do anyway. It was n

I really like this idea. It has a major strength as a boycott -- it just involves me refusing to do work which I would not have been paid to do anyway. It was never going to be possible to convince people to boycott submitting papers to top journals, as that would damage their career and standing. I also think journals as they currently stand serve an important purpose, of quality control. They are not perfect, but I have nightmares where the future of publication is just arXiv, or worse a wikipedia-style "the research anyone can edit". I'm not saying these don't have an important place, but I also want a way for the best papers to get exposure, and I think our current system is about the best way of doing that.

MikeTaylor 15y ago
[Note: I am the author of the original article, so I have a horse in this race.] I agree that the journal system provides a valuable filter. My beef is not with journal, but with locking up publicly funded research. Open-access journals are an unequivocal good. But I am not convinced that all journals filter on the right things. I like the approach of PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org/ http://www.plosone.org/), which assesses papers purely on the quality of the science, and ignores subjective notions of "impact" or "importance". The result is that everything they publish is good -- as reliable as articles published in any other journal -- but it includes articles that would never get into, say, Science or Nature due to the self-consciously super-selective approach those journals take. Anyway, that's a side-issue. The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them.
- incremental 15y ago
  Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good because they are less selective than the top tier journals? Seems an extraordinary claim to make.
  - jbri 15y ago
    No, everything PLoS ONE publishes is good because they reject everything that isn't good. The "less selective" bit manifests itself as a reduced average "impact"/"importance", rather than as a reduced average quality.
    - MikeTaylor 15y ago
      Exactly. Paradoxically, this policy has resulted in its getting a rather good impact factor for such a new journal (4.411 for 2010), which happily attracts more high-profile submissions in a virtuous circle. The moral seems clear: other things being equal, freely accessible papers tend to get cited more often than paywalled ones. (Who would have guessed?)
  - MikeTaylor 15y ago
    Perhaps I wasn't clear. Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good not because they are less selective, but although they are less selective. The reason their acceptance criteria don't adversely affect the quality of their published articles is because they do select on quality -- if it's not good, it doesn't go in. But they don't select on impact.
    - incremental 15y ago
      Ah, my mistake, I see what you're claiming. However, let me ask a more substantive question. You end by stating:"The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them." The OA model largely involves shifting the cost from the user to the author. This will be paid out of the authors grant money, which in many cases is publicly funded as well. It's not at all clear to me that the end effect is as different as the proponents claim. Reminds me a bit of how Google uses "open" as a competitive weapon to push Android. I wonder if OA publishers are not doing the same to push their business model...
      - jules 15y ago
        What exactly are those costs? Reviewers work for free. The only other thing that's needed is a web application and some hosting. These costs are negligible compared to the tax that closed journals are imposing on the scientific world.
        incremental 15y ago
        I don't really know the details. But consider what open access journals charge per article: http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php This is not cheap, and I'm very glad I didn't need to cover this back when I was publishing papers. If anyone knows a good article on the detailed economics I'd love to see it.
        alttag 15y ago
        At a premier journal in my field, a "managing editor" is paid for the 25+ hours/wk of work assigning submissions out to the SEs/AEs (based on area of focus), and—more importantly—following up with them on their progress. As I understand, he's also responsible for managing itineraries and speaking engagements for the editor-in-chief, who travels regularly evangelizing (and getting feedback on) the top journal in our field. We have a couple of EICs for major journals at our school, and I suspect (but do not know for certain) that the journal subsidizes their conference attendance too, so that the journal's senior editorial staff can meet in person at least annually. My point is: don't constrain your cost focus to just distribution. There's more to running any organization than initially meets the eye.
  - SkyMarshal 15y ago
    Not less selective, less judgemental.
- xtracto 15y ago
  >but it includes articles that would never get into, say, Science or Nature due to the self-consciously super-selective approach those journals take I think the main issue of "traditional" journals is that they are artificially constrained to publish 10 to 15 articles per month (or issue), whereas electronic publication can get rid of this constrain (as long as they have enough peer reviewers).
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  >which assesses papers purely on the quality of the science Mike, 1. Thank you for taking up the cause. 2. Trust me: Boycotting reviews is easy in my case. Unfortunately, this means no change because I stopped doing them -- it was just taking too much time for no reward. 3. wrt the above quote: I note that there is a market for selective journals. Much like reddit and HN, it is useful to have a crowd-source selection of interesting/important items. (Yes things get missed, but S/N is much higher than if I had to do it from scratch. Good luck.
  - streptomycin 15y ago
    > there is a market for selective journals. Much like reddit and HN, it is useful to have a crowd-source selection of interesting/important items. We don't need journals for that. They could be replaced by services like http://f1000.com/ http://f1000.com/
    - jpdoctor 15y ago
      I was more envisioning a reddit/HN segmented by science/engineering disciplines. In the current journal system, editor-votes have absolute veto power, and reviewer votes have large upvote power. This has led to much progress, but it is unclear that it is the best system possible. Then there is the whole segmentation question, which is a big tradeoff between S/N and coverage of the space. An example: Physical Review A, B, C, D & E used to be one journal -- Physical Review. Phys Rev had a green binder, and people would keep these dead-tree objects on shelves for reference. Well, the publication volume kept growing: Some wag calculated that rate of growth of the volumes on the shelf would cause their edge to exceed the speed of light. (He also pointed out that no information would be exchanged, so there was no violation of physics.)
      - MikeTaylor 15y ago
        Interesting idea to use something like a subreddit as a place to communally filter ("post-publication peer-review") published papers. The problem is, you wouldn't want one-man-one-vote. You'd want established professionals in the field to have a greater upvote/downvote weight than J. Random Ligger. You could imagine a sort of pagerankish scheme where people whose own publications have been upvoted get more more voting power as a result.
electrichead 15y ago
There is a problem in that it would encourage people to provide reviews as a service, and you then have a problem of filtering out who would be a good reviewer, which might be interpreted as bias. I agree that something needs to be done though. I've been thinking of the similarities between publications and web pages a la page-rank. There are a lot of parallels, not just in content but also with respect to who has contributed and who has helped to review the paper. I've often wondered why Google Scholar doesn't take advantage of this. I do suppose though that there's no money in it. Who wants to see ads in/around their article? There's a viable non-profit model here maybe.
Homunculiheaded 15y ago
The arXiv and wikipedia are not the only alternatives to paid, publisher controlled journals. There are a growing number of open access journals which have the same quality standards as any publisher controlled journals. Additionally many publishers have gotten into the habit of mass producing really poor quality journals to include in packages that libraries are forced to purchase to get other big name titles. All of the quality of a journal comes from the academics who almost always but the editing, peer review and writing in for free (or technically university time). The only real service publishers ever offered was the ability to create print journals, but that is not longer necessary (or even desirable).
- onemoreact 15y ago
  What you and several other people are missing is Journals don't spam reviewers with random studies. They put some effort into finding an appropriate group of people to review the research which both reduces the reviewer workload and prevents inappropriate people from reviewing things. Also reviewers gain an early look at research appropriate to their field of study, which granted is still mostly junk but far better than random. I don't think this is going to be hard to replicate, but it's still reasonably expensive to do well for a for a large number of articles, so I suspect open access would require at a minimum a few hundred dollars per submitted article worth of work which can’t exactly be add supported.
  - Homunculiheaded 15y ago
    The thing is there are already millions of dollar per university library going into paying for serials. Publishers make a huge profit. So the real issue is finding a model where universities can more effectively redirect that money towards open access. However I'll be the first to admit that getting universities cooperate even if it's in their collective interest is no simple task.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

MikeTaylor 15y ago

[Note: I am the author of the original article, so I have a horse in this race.] I agree that the journal system provides a valuable filter. My beef is not with journal, but with locking up publicly funded research. Open-access journals are an unequivocal good. But I am not convinced that all journals filter on the right things. I like the approach of PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org/ http://www.plosone.org/), which assesses papers purely on the quality of the science, and ignores subjective notions of "impact" or "importance". The result is that everything they publish is good -- as reliable as articles published in any other journal -- but it includes articles that would never get into, say, Science or Nature due to the self-consciously super-selective approach those journals take. Anyway, that's a side-issue. The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them.

incremental 15y ago
Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good because they are less selective than the top tier journals? Seems an extraordinary claim to make.
- jbri 15y ago
  No, everything PLoS ONE publishes is good because they reject everything that isn't good. The "less selective" bit manifests itself as a reduced average "impact"/"importance", rather than as a reduced average quality.
  - MikeTaylor 15y ago
    Exactly. Paradoxically, this policy has resulted in its getting a rather good impact factor for such a new journal (4.411 for 2010), which happily attracts more high-profile submissions in a virtuous circle. The moral seems clear: other things being equal, freely accessible papers tend to get cited more often than paywalled ones. (Who would have guessed?)
- MikeTaylor 15y ago
  Perhaps I wasn't clear. Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good not because they are less selective, but although they are less selective. The reason their acceptance criteria don't adversely affect the quality of their published articles is because they do select on quality -- if it's not good, it doesn't go in. But they don't select on impact.
  - incremental 15y ago
    Ah, my mistake, I see what you're claiming. However, let me ask a more substantive question. You end by stating:"The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them." The OA model largely involves shifting the cost from the user to the author. This will be paid out of the authors grant money, which in many cases is publicly funded as well. It's not at all clear to me that the end effect is as different as the proponents claim. Reminds me a bit of how Google uses "open" as a competitive weapon to push Android. I wonder if OA publishers are not doing the same to push their business model...
    - jules 15y ago
      What exactly are those costs? Reviewers work for free. The only other thing that's needed is a web application and some hosting. These costs are negligible compared to the tax that closed journals are imposing on the scientific world.
      - incremental 15y ago
        I don't really know the details. But consider what open access journals charge per article: http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php This is not cheap, and I'm very glad I didn't need to cover this back when I was publishing papers. If anyone knows a good article on the detailed economics I'd love to see it.
      - alttag 15y ago
        At a premier journal in my field, a "managing editor" is paid for the 25+ hours/wk of work assigning submissions out to the SEs/AEs (based on area of focus), and—more importantly—following up with them on their progress. As I understand, he's also responsible for managing itineraries and speaking engagements for the editor-in-chief, who travels regularly evangelizing (and getting feedback on) the top journal in our field. We have a couple of EICs for major journals at our school, and I suspect (but do not know for certain) that the journal subsidizes their conference attendance too, so that the journal's senior editorial staff can meet in person at least annually. My point is: don't constrain your cost focus to just distribution. There's more to running any organization than initially meets the eye.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  Not less selective, less judgemental.
xtracto 15y ago
>but it includes articles that would never get into, say, Science or Nature due to the self-consciously super-selective approach those journals take I think the main issue of "traditional" journals is that they are artificially constrained to publish 10 to 15 articles per month (or issue), whereas electronic publication can get rid of this constrain (as long as they have enough peer reviewers).
jpdoctor 15y ago
>which assesses papers purely on the quality of the science Mike, 1. Thank you for taking up the cause. 2. Trust me: Boycotting reviews is easy in my case. Unfortunately, this means no change because I stopped doing them -- it was just taking too much time for no reward. 3. wrt the above quote: I note that there is a market for selective journals. Much like reddit and HN, it is useful to have a crowd-source selection of interesting/important items. (Yes things get missed, but S/N is much higher than if I had to do it from scratch. Good luck.
- streptomycin 15y ago
  > there is a market for selective journals. Much like reddit and HN, it is useful to have a crowd-source selection of interesting/important items. We don't need journals for that. They could be replaced by services like http://f1000.com/ http://f1000.com/
  - jpdoctor 15y ago
    I was more envisioning a reddit/HN segmented by science/engineering disciplines. In the current journal system, editor-votes have absolute veto power, and reviewer votes have large upvote power. This has led to much progress, but it is unclear that it is the best system possible. Then there is the whole segmentation question, which is a big tradeoff between S/N and coverage of the space. An example: Physical Review A, B, C, D & E used to be one journal -- Physical Review. Phys Rev had a green binder, and people would keep these dead-tree objects on shelves for reference. Well, the publication volume kept growing: Some wag calculated that rate of growth of the volumes on the shelf would cause their edge to exceed the speed of light. (He also pointed out that no information would be exchanged, so there was no violation of physics.)
    - MikeTaylor 15y ago
      Interesting idea to use something like a subreddit as a place to communally filter ("post-publication peer-review") published papers. The problem is, you wouldn't want one-man-one-vote. You'd want established professionals in the field to have a greater upvote/downvote weight than J. Random Ligger. You could imagine a sort of pagerankish scheme where people whose own publications have been upvoted get more more voting power as a result.

electrichead 15y ago

There is a problem in that it would encourage people to provide reviews as a service, and you then have a problem of filtering out who would be a good reviewer, which might be interpreted as bias. I agree that something needs to be done though. I've been thinking of the similarities between publications and web pages a la page-rank. There are a lot of parallels, not just in content but also with respect to who has contributed and who has helped to review the paper. I've often wondered why Google Scholar doesn't take advantage of this. I do suppose though that there's no money in it. Who wants to see ads in/around their article? There's a viable non-profit model here maybe.

Homunculiheaded 15y ago

The arXiv and wikipedia are not the only alternatives to paid, publisher controlled journals. There are a growing number of open access journals which have the same quality standards as any publisher controlled journals. Additionally many publishers have gotten into the habit of mass producing really poor quality journals to include in packages that libraries are forced to purchase to get other big name titles. All of the quality of a journal comes from the academics who almost always but the editing, peer review and writing in for free (or technically university time). The only real service publishers ever offered was the ability to create print journals, but that is not longer necessary (or even desirable).

onemoreact 15y ago
What you and several other people are missing is Journals don't spam reviewers with random studies. They put some effort into finding an appropriate group of people to review the research which both reduces the reviewer workload and prevents inappropriate people from reviewing things. Also reviewers gain an early look at research appropriate to their field of study, which granted is still mostly junk but far better than random. I don't think this is going to be hard to replicate, but it's still reasonably expensive to do well for a for a large number of articles, so I suspect open access would require at a minimum a few hundred dollars per submitted article worth of work which can’t exactly be add supported.
- Homunculiheaded 15y ago
  The thing is there are already millions of dollar per university library going into paying for serials. Publishers make a huge profit. So the real issue is finding a model where universities can more effectively redirect that money towards open access. However I'll be the first to admit that getting universities cooperate even if it's in their collective interest is no simple task.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]