4 ms·

We complained about greedy publishers making millions, and touted open access as the solution. I used to get a couple of review requests a month, with maybe 6 w

We complained about greedy publishers making millions, and touted open access as the solution. I used to get a couple of review requests a month, with maybe 6 weeks of deadline. Now I get 10 review requests a month with two weeks (max) deadline for open access journals, who are making even more millions than the greedy publishers by publishing basically any crap with a ridiculously high fee. So, now I deny 90% of these requests because it's just absolutely meaningless, and so the requests go to other people less critical (and who write quicker reviews) which means the papers are even easier to publish. In the end, the whole thing is just a joke. If I wanted to really keep up with my research area I'd have to read 10 papers a day. The right model should be like the Oscars. Write your paper, put it up in arXiv for free, and let people read, review, and react to that. At the end of a certain period (months or year depending on it's a journal or a conference), the committee chooses a bunch of them and publishes them officially, somewhere. And leave all the rest of the crap out.

derbOac 4y ago
That's my general sense of how things should be, although increasingly I see issues with that in terms of basic "visibility" dynamics in terms of the search engine problem and so forth. For example, Google seems to be downweighting search results older than a certain amount, and I've noticed that if you go that route, it can be difficult to find certain unpublished/preprint-type papers of a certain age unless they appear in press. I think this might lead to an exacerbation of fad dynamics, because then papers that people know and remember are those that get a lot of buzz -- this happens now of course too, but I think it could be magnified in a different system. You could introduce new search engines and so forth, but that adds a layer of complexity to it, and I think journals always have a way of drawing attention to certain new papers and maintaining their real-world availability. I'm not sure I have a solution to this, but I've sort of become convinced that the approach you're describing, even though it's something I'm sympathetic to, has its own sets of problems that aren't necessarily better. I also wonder if journals will just end up being reinvented because there seems to be a logical train of thought that goes "well pay attention to those you trust to find papers" -> article curators -> fickleness about what's curated -> curation by committee/group -> reinvention of journals. Things are completely broken imho (in academics in general, not just journals) but I'm not sure what to do about a lot of it. Maybe the problems in academics have always been social weaknesses that get brushed under the rug, but now with so many people involved there's too much to brush.

derbOac 4y ago

That's my general sense of how things should be, although increasingly I see issues with that in terms of basic "visibility" dynamics in terms of the search engine problem and so forth. For example, Google seems to be downweighting search results older than a certain amount, and I've noticed that if you go that route, it can be difficult to find certain unpublished/preprint-type papers of a certain age unless they appear in press. I think this might lead to an exacerbation of fad dynamics, because then papers that people know and remember are those that get a lot of buzz -- this happens now of course too, but I think it could be magnified in a different system. You could introduce new search engines and so forth, but that adds a layer of complexity to it, and I think journals always have a way of drawing attention to certain new papers and maintaining their real-world availability. I'm not sure I have a solution to this, but I've sort of become convinced that the approach you're describing, even though it's something I'm sympathetic to, has its own sets of problems that aren't necessarily better. I also wonder if journals will just end up being reinvented because there seems to be a logical train of thought that goes "well pay attention to those you trust to find papers" -> article curators -> fickleness about what's curated -> curation by committee/group -> reinvention of journals. Things are completely broken imho (in academics in general, not just journals) but I'm not sure what to do about a lot of it. Maybe the problems in academics have always been social weaknesses that get brushed under the rug, but now with so many people involved there's too much to brush.