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It is true that journals serve as advertising/branding. That was their real value add. But article-level metrics are changing that. Now you can get stats on ind
by temphn 14y ago
It is true that journals serve as advertising/branding. That was their real value add. But article-level metrics are changing that. Now you can get stats on individual articles (e.g. # of cites, # of pageviews, listed on Faculty of 1000, Most Viewed Article), and those are increasingly influencing funding decisions.
As for the point re: editing, this is just not true. Academic journal submissions are by highly educated PhDs at the best universities; the editors on the other side just aren't as well trained. Post-submission copy editing is minimal; most of the effort by journal editors is on formatting. The reason is that in many cases the journals have failed to invest in a proper publication workflow so they have to spend time converting Word documents into their in-house style, rather than just (a) distributing a LaTeX template or (b) working on a common interchangeable format and simple rich text editor. Some of the more computational journals, like Bioinformatics or NAR in compbio do have LaTeX formats, but many like Science, Nature, or Cell do not.
So their editorial costs for their human army arise because they didn't invest in a few engineers to build a simple rich text frontend with pdf preview functionality. They are manually doing simple asserts like checking character counts in headline text rather than doing that via client-side JS. Things like that are the cost centers here. A shame.
- infinite8s 14y ago>As for the point re: editing, this is just not true. Academic journal submissions are by highly educated PhDs at the best universities; the editors on the other side just aren't as well trained. Post-submission copy editing is minimal; most of the effort by journal editors is on formatting. This is not true. Most editors are PhD-trained people (after all, they have to select the reviewers of a paper, which requires knowing the relevant people in a field who are capable of evaluating a paper). In some of the smaller, field-specific journals, editors are themselves volunteers from academia (go to your local university, find some lesser known journal and check the inside cover, which usually lists the editorial board of the journal. You'll see that most of them are university faculty).