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Are Academic Journals Obsolete?
Writing "Surely there is a better way," eggy78 asks "With the ability to get information anywhere in the world in seconds, and the virtually immediate obsolescence of any printed work, why are journals such an important part of academic research? Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted, and the information is very difficult (or expensive) to obtain. Does this hinder technological advancement? There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals? What do they offer our society? Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I will let someone else who can express this better than I explain: http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2008/05/26/why-blogs-arent-journals/
...they tend to have saner content than your average crackpot with a web page. It's all about recognition, any professor can just spew out as much junk as he likes on his webpage to show how "productive" he is. Getting journals to publish something however takes work, and that usually means you've said something significant about something significant. I suppose you could have other things like "mod points" but the current system seems to work well enough for science.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Was this question even asked by an actual scientist?
With all the kook and crackpots blogs around, of course it's vital to have peer reviewed journals. I don't have time to wade through hundreds of websites and then carry out my own verification of whether what I am reading is valid and whether they followed correct basic scientific experimental procedure. Are they basing what they think on hearsay, is it stuff that sounds obvious and intuiotive but totally wrong? A peer review process, while not perfect is essential to reducing the amopunt of noise out there.
Peer reviewed journals must stay in place, and are even more relevant today.
Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,
Peer review, peer review, peer review. It takes months or years for an article to be properly refereed and revised and revised again until it is properly ready for publication.
There already exists arxiv.org for many sciences, where people can publish results before they have been printed. However, many people that read their appropriate newsfeed will only read the articles on their that have already been published or accepted for publication. A lot of drivel gets posted on there since it is not required to be peer reviewed. Journals are a way of filtering for content that is notable and peer-reviewed.
To get any serious scientific review there has to be a place for this to happen - off the internet highway.
Perhaps what we have is good enough: true scientific journals for the scientists; Nature and Scientific American etc for the informed amateur; bloggoshere for the great unwashed.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Are academic journals obsolete? Not as long as academic status is measured by your publication record.
./ story - journals may take years to be published after articles are submitted, the peer review process can take a long time and may be faulty, paper journals might cost a lot more than online journals to produce, they may not add much to wider society.
Good points made in the
*But* being published in peer reviewed journals is still perceived as being a solid indicator of one's academic status and career progression. It's a key element of an academic CV. It's one way of getting a PhD. Poor publication record, poor career prospects. Published in prestigious journals? you're going places. Until this changes, peer reviewed journals (whether paper or online) will remain central to the academic world.
I'm speaking as a junior academic. Interested to hear of senior academics perspectives...
The question posed is, as other commenters have pointed out, ridiculous, as science must be peer reviewed.
However, a question that should be asked is whether or not printed journals are obsolete. Whenever I need to research papers, I search almost exclusively through online journals and professors' publication pages. Google scholar makes this search pretty painless, and there are free, open journals that are getting quite decent. Is it time to move to online-only publications to save costs and speed up distribution?
There is a difference between data and information. Data is what the electronic era makes available in seconds. Information takes time: you have to read more than a paragraph to really understand a complex issue. That is not to say that jounals can't be on line, but the process of analyzing data and turning it into information as academic journals do is long, difficult, and certainly not obsolete.
The image of a journal as dusty hardcopy on a shelf is out of date for the vast majority of academic publications. Reviews are now handled in days or weeks and electronic preprints appear within hours or days of acceptance. The vast majority of readers access the content electronically.
Peer reviewed academic journals serve the same purpose they always have. They provide high quality information and disseminate scientific knowledge.
Statesman
As others have said, the essential difference between journals and other forms of publishing discoveries is peer review and with it the implicit endorsement that other credible experts find these experiments valid. Any replacement for the current journal format is going to need to replicate the essential elements of the journal format in that: 1. Theories and data should only be presented when they have been reviewed and found valid by others uninvolved in the research project. 2. Those who do the reviewing are correctly selected as experts well trained enough in the area of research to be able to make valid judgements regarding the veracity of the information. 3. The format must become widely enough accepted that those who use it won't be disadvantaged in hiring and tenure decisions. (Which often hinge the opinions of professors older than 60.) There's no hard and fast reason these conditions couldn't be met in other forums than scientific journals, but so far they haven't been, and institutional inertia is going to make meeting #3 relatively difficult.
1. "why are journals such an important part of academic research?"
Reliability and respectability. You know a respectable journal has high standards. This can be reproduced on the internet, and sometimes it is, but this reproduction is still an academic journal article from a certain staff.
2. "Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted, and the information is very difficult (or expensive) to obtain. Does this hinder technological advancement? "
No. There are significant delays for publication, but there are also reasons for this delay. There simply might be too many submissions for the staff available, but it is also important to note that a submission often has to be worked and reworked in order to be considered for publication. In fact, it might be the delay itself that allows the more important articles, once refined, to promote a higher level of advancement due to the clarity and response to objection.
The access to this information is often difficult and expensive to obtain. Colleges often provide access to journal articles free of charge to the students, but there's also a push to release the articles a specific publication finds important for free. The problem lies in how to monetize this type of distribution. There really is quite a limited audience for a lot of these journals, so a high price-point is often unavoidable.
3."There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals?"
Because they still work? I don't know what you're going for here. A peer-reviewed publication is a peer-reviewed publication. The method by which it's published doesn't really matter here. If you're referring to a dead-tree journal, I admit, it's a bit anachronistic. Electronic publication can remove a lot of the delay and cost, but it will be a journal nonetheless.
4."What do they offer our society? "
A good source of information? Specialized ideas put under significant scrutiny? Something to read on the toilet? You might as well rally against citrus fruit.
5."Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
No. They do evaluate the productivity of professors. But that's not their sole purpose. They provide a good way for people in specialized fields to share information that would otherwise lack an audience. And what's wrong with productive professors?
There, troll. You're fed. Go away.
cf. "Science 2.0".
Many academic journals are gradually moving online. Some are moving towards free open access (a great idea given the ultimate purpose of academic research and the public funding behind it). And some publish each article as it becomes ready, rather than gathering them up and waiting for a full issue -- the Journal of Ecocriticism is an example. Considering the benefits of a proper peer review system, I don't see any reason why journals would become obsolete; they just have to evolve along with information technology.
I'm sort of ambivalent about the paper vs. online argument because they both have their positive and negative aspects.
For my part, with a paper journal, I don't have to worry about a server being down, or losing access to older articles because my subscription ran out. I also don't have to worry about broken links. OTOH, with electronic journals, I can access my "library" when I'm at a conference and finishing up a presentation I'll be giving. I won't need to bother with carting around years worth of journals in a suitcase.
then there would be no accountability in science.
We're deep into the information age now and one of the most important challenges for the current generation is to be able to deal with tons of information and even more misinformation. Peer reviewed articles are (for the most part) a safe haven uncontaminated by misinformation. And sure, printed dead-tree journals will get replaced with online journals, but the peer review process can't be compromised on.
After writing this I'm no longer sure if the submitter's beef is with dead-tree printing, with the peer-review process, or something else that I missed.
This question isn't even asking the right questions, just (I'm guessing) pushing an anti-journal agenda. One inaccuracy:
> Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,
Any journal that takes that long in the hard sciences wouldn't stay in print. Their own requirements are that the work be timely. I've had papers pulled because our team took too long (3 months) to submit a rewrite.
Now, an article _might_ take 2 years from 'first blog post announcing a discovery' to 'peer-accepted academic paper', but that's because the _research_, not the paper process, takes time to be both complete and thorough. I can blog "I discovered X", but any paper needs to explain why I know it's X and not Y, what the confidence levels are, and how it compares with competing explanations. In short, you have to analyze, write and edit.
The actual submission process for, say, Astrophysics Journal can go by in 3 months from submission to publication if the writing team is keeping up with the requested edits.
I will also point out ADS (at ads.harvard.edu) has provided free searchable access to astronomy journals since 1992. Further, most (if not all) astronomy journals require electronic submission (and review rounds are electronic too). So for that area of science, journals are ideal: timely, thorough, and vetted.
A.
1) Why do they exist at all, and 2) why are they published primarily in print? The first question is easy; journals are structured the way that they are in order to vet quality and remove bias. The refereeing process for prestigious journals is quite complex; the papers are often anonymized, and then read by multiple readers, each of whom are recognized as significant contributors to their field. Changes or additional data may be asked for prior to publication to clarify or improve the article. It's comparable in many ways to the work flow of any magazine or other publication, but more rigorous and involved. Also keep in mind that the people who are editing and reviewing important papers are not primarily editors; they often have full-time loads of teaching and research for a university as well. These are areas where expertise is more important than number of eyes; having 10,000 people with a sophomoric understanding of a field review a research paper in a technical field is much less useful- and possibly counter-productive- than having one or two people who have a more complete background in the topic (they've read all the papers that the new paper sites, as well as having performed their own research in the field- in other words, they have a PhD).
Why are they published on paper instead of primarily online? Well, one reason is certainly inertia. On the other hand, there are relatively few individual subscribers to these journals. They are mostly shipped to universities and research institutes, which keep them in the periodicals room for a month/quarter/whatever, and then bind them into collections and keep them in perpetuity in their library collection. After that point, the institution is not dependent on permission or payment to anyone else in order to provide access to the work in question. Print publication provides a good back-up in the event of a journal ceasing publication (taking its web site with it), or a paper or publisher running afoul of the law in some other area.
Another point to be made here is that increasingly, journals are publishing material online in addition to their print releases. There are fees associated with access (typically that only universities want to pay), but on the other hand keeping this system of rigorous refereeing going requires some monetary inputs (as does perpetually hosting and indexing these papers in a robust system). Print publication is slow, but significant papers are often also available on the web from their authors, are shared in pre-publication formats, or are presented at conferences or seminars. The rights granted to a journal on publication are often narrowly defined enough that the authors can do whatever they want with the paper before or after publication. In these scenarios, publication in a journal acts primarily as a stamp of approval, rather than as the primary channel of distribution for the information that the paper contains.
I would be happy to see every journal in the world parallel-publish their content on the web free of charge, and frankly think that a lot of academics would too. It will probably happen, eventually. However, right now you can get access to almost anything that has been published through either a university, or even public library in most cases. Technical articles in particular are increasingly made available on the web by their authors- hit the home page of any professor of computer science or a related field and you'll find lots of papers to download. Access is lagging behind primarily in non-tech savvy fields- you can very easily find free copies of significant papers in engineering fields, not so much in philosophy and ancient history. These fields will likely catch up over time, and in the meantime the number of people who have 1) the background sufficient to contribute to the field but 2) no ready access to these papers is likely to be very small. As such, I would be surprised if the journal system is really holding back progress in any meaningful way.
Peer review and good editing, typesetting etc. are absolutely vital to academics as a first line of quality control. Even with unpaid referees, the value-added still has notable cost.
A more rational question would be: Is there any reason for journals to keep publishing in paper? This is especially true in most fields of science, where most papers have either a short useful life or are only useful in a super-specialized area. Spending university library budgets on getting many of these things in print seems like a waste, especially since many fields are moving to pre-print systems to get faster turnaround and exchange of ideas.
But while many journals should probably move to low-cost, online only distribution, that doesn't mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are many things that PDFs are not sufficient, mostly to do with high resolution or large scale imagery. Certain types of cell staining, reproductions of art or rare and damaged papyrii for example, require a professional print job to be useful.
I think that many journals that can do so are already moving away from printing, because most university libraries can't afford to buy them all, and the low-prestige or specialized journals are seeing dipping subscriptions. The journal industry is already modernizing fairly quickly because of these budget pressures, and I don't think this will be a major issue for much longer.
A "peer" is someone of like education who is likely considered an expert in your field.
A "layman" is everybody else.
Digg has a lot more than just your peers reviewing it. Also, Digg publishes _NO_ articles, they just hyperlink them.
Academic journals most definitely are not obsolete. Turnaround time is very reasonable at the top chemistry journals. We're talking about times on the order of weeks for some rapid communication journals (from submission to peer review to edits to proofs to online publication), and a small number of months for full papers and reviews. Maybe some other fields suffer from slow publication, but that's not an inherent quality of academic journals.
In the electronic age, journals retain information in a searchable format that keeps up with the times. For some journals, even articles back in the 1800s are now online in PDF format. And the indexing services like Chemical Abstracts have gone online, too, moving tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of abstracts to an online database. Don't publish within the paradigm, and your stuff doesn't get abstracted, and when your peers search for it, they don't find it.
Academic journals haven't become obsolete. They've evolved.
We're not talking about shitty corporate news sources like CNN being supplanted by web loggers. That worked because the quality of reporting is the same on both - i.e. non-existent. They offer the same info, but with private web loggers you can at least get a little bit of flavor to the story, rather than the dry cookie-cutter rehashed AP/Reuters four paragraph 'news' report.
Throw the thoughts that the same thing will happen to scientific journals away. Scientific progress NEEDS peer-review. If it were somehow opened like web blogging then it would be impossible for anyone to separate actual science from the ubiquitous noise of slop-science and at worst total pseudoscience/nutjobs.
Ugh, it gives me visions of a wikipedia for scientific articles. Just imagine, several hundred pages devoted to people's research into "body toxins," "chi," and "maintaining harmony with nature." I mean wikipedia proper already does that, but no one considers it a serious scientific resource (thank god).
Peer review is the single most important aspect of scientific/mathematical development, and that doesn't exist online, unless it's reprinting the peer reviewed journals. The process for journal publication is what ensures that there is quality being printed and that multiple other scientists agree with the results (or rather, don't find problems with it).
You'll notice http://www.claymath.org/millennium/ has seven, $1million problems and the money won't be awarded until a solution has been published, and survives the peer review process for two years. Without this process, there is no mechanism for separating people who sound like they know what they're talking about, and people who *actually* know what they're talking about.
Not only is it free, it has a high impact rating in the UK, so we can even publish there without having our careers impacted. Backed by the Institute of Physics, it is an example of what journals could easily become in time. I doubt that much in there will be of interest to the /. community, but it's a harbinger of things to come across all fields, I hope. I would expect that within 10-20 years, there'll be very few, if any pay-to-publish-and-pay-to-read journals.
In the same way that HEP has been using linux now for at least a decade, we are getting there with publishing too. Let's hope we can have some more examples here of other serious sciences with open-access journals.
Peer review is an essential part of scientific progress. In the academic and research community an innovation is not just something you think is new, but is something that someone else in your field can acknowledge is new and improves the state of the art in the field.
That said, there are many improvements that can be made. It would be nice to move the whole review process online for all journals(a large fraction of it already is, especially for engineering journals by IEEE). Sites such as arxiv help the physics community a lot by allowing others to view preprint versions of articles. Conferences and technical sessions, which have shorter deadlines also help a lot in publishing shortened versions of new directions in research.
As for those who think it should be free, that is another story. Cost of publication is already moving more and more to the author. The current model, where subscriptions are paid for takes some of this burden off the author. In most cases, most universities have site licensed access to digital libraries, with publications (such as pubmed for medical research, IEEE digital library for engineering etc). Individuals can access publications by going to a library. I do not think it is realistic to expect that price of access (to nonacademic or non-research) people is going to come down.
Practically speaking it should not, as the costs will be directed to the authors (grad students and professors) who will then have to pick and choose what to publish and where due to publication fees. To give you an idea, there are some journals where publication carries a voluntary charge of $110 per page for the author, and this is despite having subscription. If subscription prices were removed, the author would be forced to pay that.
Legally obligatory sig : My opinions are my own... etc etc
Journals act as a combination of quality control and aggregation/filtering of "interesting" material. When you read an article which has been published by an academic journal, you have some assurance both that the content is of reasonably high quality and that it is likely to be important and interesting to someone interested in the field the journal covers. The journal also assures you that these evaluations have been made by competent experts in the field who do not have a conflict of interest in evaluating the work. The system also gives scientists access to reviewers they may not be personally familiar with, who frequently make recommendations to improve the work before publication. Obviously there are problems on occasion (conflicts of interest occur, or bad articles make it in/good articles are rejected) but journals still act as a pretty decent filtering mechanism.
Is it possible that this could be handled purely online in some decentralized manner? I suppose so, but I expect that the signal to noise ratio would be much lower and the quality of reviewing would be likely to suffer.
Note that I'm not defending the current expensive paper-publication restricted-access model: the jury is out on how well that will survive. But I think it's worth noticing that even online open-access journals like PLoS ONE still follow a recognizable editor-reviewer model, and still charge submission fees to operate.
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
In addition to the need for the extensive peer review process, there's the bit that many journals are intended for archival of work, to give a complete account of a sort of microcosm of research.
The main thing I wanted to point out is that the name of a journal is very relevant to how much kudos you get for publishing there. Some journals are prestigious and others are so-so, like conferences. What I mean is that a new journal (or conference) has to prove itself over a long period of time before people will treat its publications with the same respect as an established journal.
Plenty of journals offer their papers free online, and more are moving that direction. It'll just take time for existing journals to move over cause it takes a shift in their business model and it'll take time for any new purely online journals to establish themselves. In terms of trust, even if there had been online journals with the advent of the public internet 15 or so years ago, 15 years is vastly shorter than many of these journals have been around.
In a community where trust in the review process is so important, things change slowly, cause building trust takes time.
As an academic myself, I can only say it would be utter madness to do away with academic journals. Peer review, though sometimes flawed (editorial bias), serves as information quality control. Yes, tripe still gets published. Yes, good papers still get refused. But it works well enough.
However, again, as an academic myself, I am very much opposed to the insane prices to get at research, both as a researcher and a writer. I have found that, if your research budget can't handle getting at a key piece of research, an email to the person who did it oftentimes results in a Word file or a PDF, because what they want is for you to read and use their work as well.
All this really is is the same copyright/IP storm we see everywhere else. Producers and consumers want each others' lives to be easy and to be able to meet each others' needs. But there is a massive organization in the middle that maybe costs too much but which handles some of the important work necessary to avoid wasting people's time. It's fun to research, but no one really likes reading all the unfiltered crap, so those people--regular professors--on those editorial boards have to be paid.
I'm seeing Creative Commons licenses creeping in, slowly, though. I think we'll see big changes coming down the pipe in academic, peer-reviewed journals, same as anywhere else.
Unfortunately, the quality control by academic journals is getting worse and worse.
Because of the strict limits on the number of atoms per issue, journals reject perfectly good science that isn't important enough science. And that makes us stupider.
Classical Print Journals(CPJ) have small brains, long and slow nerve pathways....and they are extinct now, but will take a while to die.
In truth, the CPJ must adapt or perish. The threats they make to discourage people from using the online journals are only effective against others whose brains are also like dinosaurs.
Is also harms the third world who either do without, or get e-mailed copies.(although there is a little 'mercy-sex' availability given by the CPJ
This means a parallel community who uses online journals and who love their immediacy will supplant the CPJ.
So how will they adapt? They must become online journals and find another funding model.
Your question is actually two questions blurred together. Changes in technology are finally unblurring them.
Question One: Is a mechanism for quality controlled, peer reviewed papers to be exchanged between researchers in a given field? Answer: Yes, yes there is. I strongly suspect that dead trees are no longer a good way to do that(and given the limited circulation of some journals, electronic copy + print on demand is probably more viable than printing up a bunch in any case). At very least, I assume we'll be seeing journal articles being exchanged in PDF or similar form; and there are numerous directions for online collaboration(wikis, distributed version control systems, listservs, etc, etc.) that researchers will experiment with. Some will work, some will die, progress will be made.
Question Two: Are journal publishers obsolete? Yes, oh dear god yes. For the most part, publishers in our present system are parasites. They have some editors, and handle the logistics of printing; but the researchers, the research, the papers, and the peer reviewers are all provided gratis by academia. Publish or perish and all that. Sometimes researchers have to pay some sort of publication fee, and even give up print rights to their own work. The publishers turn around and earn, shall we say, generous margins by selling the fruits of researchers back to themselves.
The publishers do provide necessary elements(editors, logistics, etc.); but they are insanely costly for the service they offer. There will always be some sort of company(s) around to provide these services; but we need to push them into the position of providing these services at market rates, not extracting monopoly rents on the labor of researchers. I'm sure online is cheaper than paper, and definitely more convenient; but profit, not paper, is the real money sink here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against companies being profitable; but only by providing actual service, not by exploiting market power.
It depends a bit on what you're arguing about here. Printed journals have largely gone the way of the dodo bird, but the content and process of journals has moved online. Admittedly I only read chemistry, physics and comp sci journals so I might be a bit biased here but just about every article published in the last 30 years is online, or is in the process of being put online already. Other fields may have different luck, essepcially if you're looking for works more than about 30 or 40 years old where works were published in english, french, german, russian and earlier latin, all of which is a pain to move online in any usable form (there's no nice PDF to work with).
/. style condensed headers is ok but flipping through a full article and results has it's advantages too.
Getting access to journals does cost. I have a membership in the canadian association of physics, the asscoiation of computing machinery and will need to get an IEEE membership as well. Most universities have subscriptions and you can directly access the articles from the web as long as you're logged in on an university machine or if you go the round about route of logging into your library web site or via your professional society membership site.
I'd be interested to know which journals take 2 years to print anything? If you have an article that takes 2 years to print it's usually because it isn't any good, that could be that the content isn't good, or the writing style isn't good but either way if it takes that long to get anything published the problem is with the person trying to publish (when in doubt, try a different journal because yes, some journals are a bit dickish about who they'll accept articles from).
There are a lot of benefits of journal content presentation sytles. While journal articles are written for 'experts' in a field, they still need to be accessable to people in the process of becomming an expert. That forces papers to dumb down the first part of their presentation so that an undergrad can understand it, and establishes a standard form for presentation of results so that other experts can understand it.
The big advantage of print journals is the easy of which I can 'browse'. The web certainly does this better for young people like myself, but for people in there late 30's and older who still get a magazine and read it on the couch or in their office, journals work well. I've never been an astrophysicist, but as a physical scientist I should probably have some vague clue what the major work in that field is, and I should also have some attention to what goes on in say, biology. Browsing
Comp sci seems to live and breathe on conferences far more than journals (there are journals but I think it's difficult to establish a journal for a field that won't exist in 5 years and didn't exist last year). After spending two years trying to do research in comp sci (after 6 years doing research in physics), I prefer the electronic journal system of physics better. Conference proceedings vary wildly in their quality and conference attendance is far more expensive than a decent journal.
I'm not really sure there's a much better measure of a researchers quality. As with any profession, periodically you document the work that you've done, someone who ought to understand the work looks it over and gives either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Journals are a means of both disseminating that information in consistent form, and assessing quality by other people who would understand it. It's never quite that simple but the system really works reasonably well.
There's plenty of good science that isn't important science, but the place for it isn't Science or Nature: it's in Journal of Tiny Sub-field. Most of the time, when a good article is rejected by a broad or high-impact journal, it later appears in a more specialized one which is read only by people working on the same type of thing.
This is not a bad thing! This is the kind of sorting that is supposed to happen, and the existence of lower-tier journals is vitally important when you're looking for specialized work. I know I read articles form these journals at least as often as I read the big names, because they include details vital to my work. By the same token, we expect articles in the broad-based journals to have enough general interest that they will spark ideas in people outside their own tiny fields.
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
Today's Academic Journals maintain the status quo, and retard scientific progress.
It took Einstein 5 years to convince Max Planck he had something worthwhile in Special Relativity, yet the paper was published by the editors of the day. Today's editors would not have published it, as they are scared stiff of publishing anything which might be 'incorrect', or anything which the peer reviewers won't endorse.
Maintenance of the status quo is the price we pay so that University bean counters can have a standard by which they measure academic performance. It is a high price, indeed.
The non-profits' mandate is to further scientific knowledge by aiding dissemination. Many don't charge authors to publish their papers, some ask for covering of publication cost (usually covered in the research grant). If you opt not to pay you will be placed in a queue since there is a page budget for free articles and your paper may be delayed for quite awhile. In principle these journals see nothing wrong with online dissemination (after the paper is accepted for publication and reviewed).
Some disciplines like physics have pioneered in putting up preprints so that work can move forward more quickly. The journals don't regard this as prior publication. The non-profits don't charge much beyond printing and overhead costs to the libraries and much less to individuals.
The situation is a bit blurred for those journals that accept advertising, especially in the medical field.
The for-profit publishers charge thousands or even more for a year of a specialty journal. They don't charge authors but they overcharge libraries. They are, of course, reluctant to see their market undermined by online publication. These journals have gotten so expensive (and there are so many of them - especially in biological sciences) that libraries have formed consortiums to share copies. The for-profits are not doing a service to science, only their bottom line.
-- Robert D Feinman Landscapes, Panoramas, Photoshop Tips and Musings on Society
It's not that it's on paper. The important aspect is the editorial board that performs the peer review, and the reputation of that board (i.e., that journal).
There have been cases of revolt of editors against the greedy paper publishers, some of which abandoned one title journal to form a new title journal, covering the same area. The main one that comes to mind is something like the Journal of Symbolic Mathematics of something like that. They successfully dumped the paper publisher.
Paper is not going away. Sure, more libraries will go to electronic-only, but the fact is that the underpinning of our entire civilization (law, science, etc.) relies upon physical recordation. If it ain't written, it don't exist.
IAAMS (I am a medical student), and medical journals are PARAMOUNT to the field of medicine. I mean, after medical school, you have 3-5 years or so of residency (depending on your field), and then NOTHING forever. So basically, a guy in a private practice who graduated in 1970 has no real exposure to new medicines, techniques, surgeries and other therapies other than monthly periodicals. These are very important, and peer-reviewed and the main way doctors learn new concepts outside of hospitals, conventions and other settings which half of doctors will never encounter.
While we're at it, I'll vent that this is exactly why pharmaceutical reps are in many ways very GOOD for medicine (and therefore, good for patients like you and me). Most doctors will find a class of drug that they like and prescribe that one forever. If a doc prescribes Lovastatin (cholesterol lowering drug), he/she will probably do that out of habit for all high cholesterol patients, and never look at Zetia, Somatostatin or other therapies. Drug reps introduce them to new drugs. Only a fool would prescribe the new drug simply because the hot rep brought them sandwiches. Of 10 reps that come by, maybe one will convince the doctor to use that product. But it's still a good thing docs are exposed to them. Once you find a drug that works for a specific problem, with little (or acceptable) side effects, most docs would have little reason to say "Gee, this drug is pretty darn good. Let me try and find a new drug for no reason that may or may not have different effects." The rep will introduce the new product, usually supply a New England Journal of Medicine article studying it, and the doc will say "thanks," eat the sandwich, and decide for him/herself if the drug is right.
So in conclusion, not all doctors (and in fact, very few) are tech-wizards or Slashdotophiles. The chief of surgery at my hospital (BRILLIANT world-renowned guy here in Manhattan) could not turn on his laptop and asked me to run his powerpoint show for him. If you're going to cut him off from "obsolete" paper journals and rely on online journals for him to get information, you can safely assume that he will never again read another study that is post-2008.
Of course they aren't. I'm a graduate student and I use journal repositories such as JSTOR all the time (which is a lifesaver), as well as the other databases my library offers. I'm a Classics major (not English classics, I mean Latin and Greek), and many of the sources I utilise can be quite old; we also use a lot of journal articles. Indeed, as someone said above, quality control is a good use for journals. In any case, for a paper I just wrote, I actually had to dig up a journal article from microfiche, and got a few interesting points out of it. So no, they are not obsolete in the slightest. The field in which I study, well, that's a different matter, heh...
Of course they are obsolete, who needs peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals when I can read peer-reviewed articles on Wikipedia.
</sarcasm>
Anybody who believes proper peer review can be done at the drop of a hat is an ass. I won't bore you with the details. Either a moment's reflection will tell you why, or you're hopelessly out of touch with how real science gets done.
There's probably some sloppiness in the system that delays the prompt publication of a well-refereed paper. But how fast, really, can people who are busy conducting their own research find the time and money to duplicate other peoples' experiments?
If you want to start cutting corners in order to get more papers through the system faster, you're going to compromise the quality of review, and you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be no shortage of Philistines eager to use the resulting errors to further undermine the scientific process.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Standard journals are dying steadily. They are based on subscriptions, which can reach $30,000 for, a single journal, for a library, and as much as $5,000 for individuals.
The research published in them is hard to access, and often invisible to search engines. Open Access journals [OAJ|http://www.doaj.org/] are funded by publication charges, usually not printed, although the [PLOS|http://www.plos.org/] journals are an exception.
Research published in Open Access journals is more cited than similar research published in the subscription only literature, and, as a result, the latter is dying out.
The main losers are the shareholders of academic publishers, which are extremely profitable ventures at the moment.
-- Anthony Staines
"With the ability to get information anywhere in the world in seconds..... The noise ratio is exploding"
Should read the quote. Its actually pretty hard to find solid works just by googling and reading the "bloggings" of researchers.
No one has mentioned so far the growing importance of academic conferences over journals. In some fields, particularly computer science, the problems with journal articles cited by the original poster have led to a greater emphasis of conferences.
Here's some assertions I'm not going to fact check now but have seen in the past few years:
a) In computer science, the major conferences have a higher rejection rate than journals.
b) Conference papers are submitted, accepted, and appear in under one year. Journals articles in CS take an average of 32 months to appear.
c) Traditionally the model is to publish results in a couple of conferences and then sum it up in a significant journal paper. A number of cs academics have gone to a conference first and only strategy, bypassing journals.
d) Conferences are a perfectly valid venue to cite in cs.
e) ACM and IEEE have put out position papers to defend the importance of conferences when campuses consider faculty for tenure (since faculty in other fields may not understand.)
f) Conferences often bypass the for profit publishers (not that IEEE is a charity).
g) In a flip move, many conferences proceedings now appear as special issues of a journal.
Combine all this with a move to electronic distribution (no printed conference proceedings, just a CD/DVD) moves the process to an online model.
So some of the problems cited by the original poster have been mitigated in part by a move to conferences as a significant academic outlet. And the conference itself, with the chance to meet and talk with the authors, builds community and confidence in results.
I'd hate to have to find articles without the organisation that journals bring. And no, Google doesn't cut it when searching for academic sources. Google Scholar can be helpful, but that relies on journals and their publishers. I'm not (generally) going to bother reading something that hasn't been publish in a journal. It has little or no credibility in the academic world. There is no way of verifying an independent source, unless you get it first-hand. I don't believe everything I read on the internet, so why would I rely on it to give me academically credible articles unless I can verify it based on the source (ie, the journal it was published). Of course, the degree of this depends a lot on your field of study.
---- Don't lick something unless you really mean it.
1. As everyone else has mentioned peer review is quality control. There are a lot of cranks out there, I have read some of their papers.
2. Yes, occasionally it takes a year or more to go from initial submission to print. Editors get a lot of papers and reviewers are busy and review papers out of the "kindness of their heart."
3. In order to do a good review it takes about a solid week or two of really careful reading. I like to think I do good reviews, cross referencing other works and trying to make sure the results provided are novel and correct. Many IEEE journals give between 1 and 3 months to make sure you get that solid week time.
4. Almost every journal I've referenced in the past 24 months is online. So ease of access at academic institutions is a non-issue.
5. As for free vs. pay, well we live in a profit driven society and the journals feel they are performing a service and wish to be paid for it.
Peer Review.
However, again, as an academic myself, I am very much opposed to the insane prices to get at research, both as a researcher and a writer. I have found that, if your research budget can't handle getting at a key piece of research, an email to the person who did it oftentimes results in a Word file or a PDF, because what they want is for you to read and use their work as well.
All this really is is the same copyright/IP storm we see everywhere else. Producers and consumers want each others' lives to be easy and to be able to meet each others' needs. But there is a massive organization in the middle that maybe costs too much but which handles some of the important work necessary to avoid wasting people's time. It's fun to research, but no one really likes reading all the unfiltered crap, so those people--regular professors--on those editorial boards have to be paid.
I agree completely with this post.I just want to add that usually I simultaneously submit to a journal and the arXiv so that my work can be found prior to print. The hope is that once the work is read it will be used and the author that cite my work will cite the official journal article instead of the arXiv.
Although strictly the work is copyrighted and owned by the journal, the journals are flexible with fare use. I think that its pretty well understood that any journal that goes after scientific authors for freely giving pre-prints and posting to the arXiv will be unofficially boycotted.
As an academic, who has been involved on both sides of the process, author and editor, I think this article is off base.
With the ability to get information anywhere in the world in seconds...Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted
Two years would be highly unusual; a journal with such a long publication lead time would soon find itself without submissions from authors. The parts of the process that take the most time are the peer review, the essential quality-control step, and the revisions by the authors.
the information is very difficult (or expensive) to obtain
The main users of these publications have access at university libraries and almost all major journals are already online. As for expensive, organizing, preserving and keeping a repository of published research will cost something.
Does this hinder technological advancement?
No, why would it?
There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals?
What other venues? Most journals are available as PDFs.
What do they offer our society?
They hold the main body of research published to date...or should we hit reset and start over?
Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?
No more or less so than the hypothetical and unspecified "other venues" would be.
Half Word - Will Double, Wire Palindrome, San Francisco
Aww, are you butt hurt that your brilliant crank works have been rejected time and time again? Surprise surprise.
Those upper-tier academic journals that take forever to publish articles are in for a serious Godsmacking as for-profit journals like Nature set up more journals. This is bad for the consumer, because Nature journals are too expensive. But, it may speed up the other journals eventually (take a hint Physical Review Letters) as all the best papers will go to Nature.
I used to like browsing through copies of Nature etc from early in the 20th century, even 19th century. Original papers. If an article gets published online today. What is the guarantee that it will be accessible in any form in 100 years. Old journal articles are still valuable to read, you would be amazed at how much is continually being re-discovered because someone hasn't read a past article.
Someone also mentioned peer review. I think that is not a difficult thing to do online, and is probably a lot easier. As I said my main concern is the longevity of the item.
Bitter and proud of it.
As I was quite surprised to find out when I moved into the field, apparently in Computer security the journals are not the main publishing venue, conference proceedings are. When I asked why, the answer I usually got is that journals are too slow for such a fast moving field. I don't know yet if I buy that. It may also have to do with the fact that the field is so recent (so there weren't any really well-established journals before the internet hit in force).
Conference proceedings are still peer reviewed, but with only one round of reviewing, which means that the program committee (based on the reviewers reccomandations) decides which papers to accept, and they send you back the verdict and the reviews. But since there isn't a second round of reviewing you don't really have to make the improvements the reviewers ask for, your paper is already accepted! (in fact, further work on it is seen as half-wasted.. keep it for the next paper!)
Peer Review, Quality Control, etc. can all be obtained without putting out a printed journal. It seems terribly backwards for... well, science in general.
Let's say I invented an artificial salt and submitted a formula and explanation for peer review to a journal. This is something very simple and would have to fit very few criteria: does it taste like salt and can it do any more harm to a person than real salt? It is not a question that will take two years to answer.
Yet a lot of these these journals seem to be quarterly, biannual (sexy!), or annual and I'm stuck.
Why can't they move to some sort of online model like - dare I say it - Slashdot? Much, much better peer review and much more competent editors (different for each field, and highly respected), but effectively the same thing. Sure, there won't be new articles every day, but biweekly or monthly could be a reality.
And for those people who are looking for an old-style printed journal, well... there's always Ctrl+P.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
NO, restrictive practice, and control, not of quality but dissent. First, the publication delay is un-consionable, the journal is not now heavier to post. Secondly, if a paper dissents from the position of the editors/reviewers it won't get published, whatever, and in politicised areas of science eg climatology, bio-engineering this is __dangerous__.
Finally, lots of people are doing nothing more than moderated blogging inefficiently and badly to the benefit __only__ to a tiny number of very well established commercial entities.
To make it real simple, the moderated reviewers can post their comments on the paper, and this open commentary will hopefully help the following students/workers in the area. As one who has reviewed endless scientific papers it would be much more efficient if the supervisor fixed most of th problems early on.
Obsolete? Hell no. I used academic journals & web-based journal database (the subscription was paid by the college) to do research for essay writings; without these journals and the online database, the research process would be more tedious.
On the contrary, my work (Project COSA) has never been more popular. COSA is about to burst onto the multicore scene like a locomotive. Surprise, surprise.
I think that there will always be a need for scholarly authority, which until now has been conferred by reputation of the presenter and/or publishing house and journal.
I do think that things are ripe for change, and have been very influenced and inspired by the "New Metrics of Scholarly Authority" piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i41/41b00601.htm
Academic journals will likely end up joining the online world, and the free vs. open model will settle down, but they are unlikely to be obsolete. I am a reviewer and author for several journals, and that is unlikely to change in my lifetime.
The top computing publishing venues, ranging from SIGGRAPH to ISCA, are conferences. The turnaround is far quicker than journals. The quality is very high due to strict peer reviews. And the conferences are a top-notch place to share ideas.
Academics in computing fields realized journals were obsolete years ago. Thats why conferences rule.
In a world of "if you want to read it, just look it up on-line and read it for free", if you want to ensure your work gets read by almost noone, publish with a journal that doesn't allow people to download the articles for free. As a researcher, if you want your hard work read, then whatever you do, post your work on a website that doesn't charge for access!
You nailed it. Anyone can be considered "scientifically relevant" if they're willing to bribe the academic clearing houses. The aristocracy of science is the complete antithesis to its actual purpose.
Science, even bullshit science, is big money.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
They can only report original work rather than synthesize and consolidate existing work.
Thus what is valuable in the field gets submerged in a torrent of crap, sometimes never to see the light of day again.
Where existing work is referenced, the reference is usually to an obscure and (unless you in a first world first rate university) unobtainable journal.
When you finally get that paper, it is a smidgeon of information packed atop an array of references to earlier work in obscurer journals.
TAKE A STEP BACK PEOPLE!
Think of all this as _the_ primary User Interface on the body of human knowledge.
What a crap UI!
The academic establishment is currently built around the idea that publication somehow indicates value - if you write papers and (better still) get them cited, it means you are a Good Person. This has led to the proliferation of journals, conferences and quite honestly, crap.
I've been there. I've published (not a lot, but some), including publications in conferences I have respect for, but also including publications in conferences that exist mostly to publish stuff so academics can do their scholarly doody(!). I know better (as do most people) than to try to publish negative results - even though these can be interesting and help researchers to avoid dead ends.
I know people who have been fantastic in the field, but whose publications have not been enough for their institutions. I know others who get a few things published and then sit on the organizing committees for conferences so they can be assured that their friends will review their papers (and the papers of their students and so on) and get publication credits. I know far too many people who go for the Least Publishable Unit and write the same paper over and over and over with a smidgen of new content each time.
Worse yet are the for-profit publishers. One of the worst such is Springer. If you see that Springer is publishing something, don't just avoid it, run away and hide. Recently I read a book published by them (which shall remain nameless) with about 10 chapters by different authors. Of those 10 chapters, two were by the same people (who just happened to be editing the collection), two were by people who turned out (after a quick web search) to be ex-students of the editors and two more were by the same group of authors and on the same topic. Worse yet, only one of the chapters had anything to do with the content (according to the title and preface) and one was almost completely incoherent.
The publishing industry is a leech (or lamprey eel or vampire bat or something) on the absurd requirements and pretensions of academia. It should go away.
That doesn't mean that something else shouldn't take its place - we do need ways to check and double check research results. But the current system doesn't work - it rewards lies (to get positive results in a project), cronyism and generally is more of a drain on the research effort than a plus.
And if it is bad in the sciences, the humanities are far worse. More nonsense is published in the field of literary criticism than you can possibly imagine - worse yet it tends to become next years content in college english classes.
"Run away!" Even worse than that, it becomes books which libraries buy instead of books that contain real content.
I have seen the change over the years for professional journals becoming less about providing unadulterated knowledge, and more about providing information. By this I mean, the information is often contaminated by companies submitting their 'self-funded' studies under the guise of true research.
The journals tend to ignore this problem because these companies generally provide either advertising revenue, or other income to the journal and related professional association that sponsors (publishes) the journal.
Additionally, peer review is becoming a bit of a misnomer with respect to a few journals I am aware of. As such, I would call it 'peer-approval'.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
For example, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (which funds a most of the research in the health sciences in Canada) has this policy: http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/34846.html
Editorial bias is not the only issue with the journal model we have now. A bigger issue may be that negative results are so unlikely to be published that researchers won't even submit them.
A "fun" thing to do is a research synthesis where you compare the findings in the refereed journal articles with those from dissertation abstracts. Dissertations usually have a much higher rate of negative findings.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
All the dozen or so I take are online and many allow access well before the hard copy appears. Also electronic subscriptions are much cheaper than print.
:-(
Cost is still an issue. As the corporate libraries have disappeared I've had to cough up over $1000/yr
Tools of the trade for some of us, so can't be helped.
rhb
(Imagine a wikipedia reviewed ONLY by the qualified.)
But the problem is who will PAY FOR THIS?
Peer review is an expensive process.
You can't just throw up a Wiki, even a secure one, and expect that people will give you their hard fought research to put up there and that others will do the work required to peer review the research.
To answer my own question, anybody can get secure access once they PAY for access.
The scarce resource is the editorial staff and access to 'peers.' Its not paper.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
With the ability to get information anywhere in the world in seconds, and the virtually immediate obsolescence of any printed work, why are journals such an important part of academic research?
...
Ease of accessibility is orthogonal to the question of what the role of academic journals is in modern society. Journals perform one basic service: vetting. The more prestigious the journal, the more exacting the vetting (and, nominally, the converse is true). There are journals which accept well under 30% of submissions. It is entirely based on reputation, and the only way of developing reputation is to have a long, consistent history of certain behaviors. Journals, good ones at least, publish high-quality work.
In what field does the appearance of a printed article mean certain obsolescence? Certainly none of the ones I'm familiar with, consider publishing in, and read on a regular basis.
Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,
While the reviewing process can be slow in some cases, the mean time to publishing for most high-quality academic journals is (warning, purely subjective experience:) under a year. What journals are routinely taking over two years from initial submission to appearing in print? I'm not personally aware of any that take this long.
and the information is very difficult (or expensive) to obtain.
Difficult? In what way? If you have a subscription, journals go out of their way to make it easy to get copies of the articles. In fact, journals make it easy to access the abstracts so as to entice you to purchase the content. If you are an academician, you likely have an affiliation with an institution that would already have a subscription. If you work in industry, the cost of purchasing an article shouldn't be prohibitive. Google Scholar in addition to a wide variety of indexing services make it nearly trivial to find out about articles. With the new NIH mandate that any NIH-funded research must be publicly available after one year, nearly all biologically-related research will be free and easy. I smell a troll.
Does this hinder technological advancement?
I cannot imagine anyone would think that technological advancement (the fact that the OP does not say "scientific" advancement is perhaps a sign that the whole posting is a troll) has been held back appreciably over the last 50 years.
There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals?
Such as? I'm not familiar with any. Peer review and journal publication are symbiotic. Or did you think that the Slashdot model is peer review? It's definitely related (I've had discussions about Slashdot with editors of PLoS and Nature which, I suspect, influenced their earlier implementation of community review).
What do they offer our society?
This is a troll.
Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
No, as other responders have written, journals are gatekeepers to the permanent record of what is considered to be high-quality knowledge. You don't hear criticisms about accuracy levied at Nature and Science the way you do at Wikipedia, and while there are occasional retractions, the top journals are well-regarded because they are, in large part, careful. That said, one way of evaluating academic productivity is to measure publication rate. But then, one way of evaluating business productivity is to measure quarterly profit. Both are good, and both are incomplete unless you consider other factors as well.
On the whole, the questions posed in this posting are all somewhere between just naive and outright trolls.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I have been wanting to get into the ACM for a while now, but $50 is not in my budget.
Before anyone slams me for being a cheapskate please remember, I'm not from a wealthy family, I use the University's internet service and $50 is a huge amount for something that is essentially extracurricular education.
Frankly that's the only reason I read slashdot, to get an idea of what's going on in the industry. Remove the user login screens on these journals and watch the users flow in.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
"The aristocracy of science is the complete antithesis to its actual purpose."
There are many historical instances of the aristocracy of the establishment hindering progress, sure. The story of the 'amateur' mathematician Fermat is one of my favorite examples to cite... it took a couple hundred years for the rest of the world to catch up with some of his ideas.
But the establishment is not supposed to be protecting the cutting edge, they are supposed to be ensuring the integrity of our core knowledge repositories. Anything that makes it into a journal should be vetted to death and given time to show its flaws before joining the core.
The alienation felt by progressive outsiders, including people shunned by the established journals, may actually be a key component to progress (just my unfounded, anecdote based opinion). Many of these outsiders never get recognition during their lifetimes, and have been reported to feel the way you seem to about the ethics of the established scientific institutions... all of which motivates them to strive harder in their own direction to the ultimate benefit of our species.
This is the reason that journals were good, but now are bad: they used to promote the distribution of scientific information. Now, the same end can be acheived through the arXiv, which is free.
Journals may be obsolete, but peer review is critical to the rational thought. It is very important that other people vet ideas to identify mistakes.
journals are just a nickname for electronic blocks. peer-review is already done electronically...but i tell you 9:10 would print the paper, take it outside for a read in the sun. Think about it for a couple of weeks...write a report and get back.
good science is slow and careful, so your 'internet will pick this up' is kinda lame and not very imaginative. Instead focus on how one could redefine a 'publishable unit'...this is where the net could make difference...but not in changing the way we do science...its hundreds of years of tradition and it works very well actually.
[quote]time travel, cats that are both dead and alive when nobody is looking, parallel universes, dimensions that curled up into little balls so tiny as to be unobservable, etc...[/quote]
These are the product of misinterpretation (on your part), not of peer review.
Peer-reviewed journals do not hide science from public scrutiny. These journals are generally publicly available (while usually not directly so online, certainly through free-access libraries) and are certainly not the only place to publish. Among groups whose work tends to run below the typical peer-review standard (or groups who want to make a point), there are plenty of online public journals.
It is elitism, but not financial elitism. It is intellectual elitism, mixed with a dose of what's trendy.
The journals do a good job, for the most part, at keeping out well-paying stupidity. If your article is genuinely bad, you'll have a hard time getting it published anywhere high-profile. Really--you can come in with as much money as you want, and you still won't be considered relevant. If you disagree, please provide at least two examples.
If your article is relatively bad (but on an absolute level at least decent), then it can still get published if you're well-known, if you're working in a hot area, and if you submit to a high profile journal that cares about such things (e.g. Science or Nature). This is unfortunate, but this is an aspect of human nature that is really hard to keep under control.
There are certainly parts of the peer review process that are less than ideal--reviewers don't take the time to understand what they're reviewing, or they have an emotional reaction to something that seems to undercut their fond hopes for how something will turn out and make stupid, picky attacks on a paper, or they realize that they're about to get scooped and so ask for every pedantic little thing so they gain more time for their own work. But even with these flaws, the process does a pretty good job at rejecting junk; it just rejects a little too much non-junk, too, or at least makes the process more painful than necessary.
Still, for humanity to reliably accumulate knowledge, we need a mechanism that rejects almost all obvious junk, and the scientific journals are the ones who are still doing a pretty good job of that.
Some of the secondary uses--e.g. evaluating whether an assistant professor should get tenure--are overblown, but you can't blame the journals for that. That's not why they exist (although it does encourage people to use them more); they exist to provide a peer review mechanism (for profit). If another *good* peer review mechanism appears, it could supplant journals, but none have yet.
Actually, it makes us less knowledgeable. Field-specific journals tend to be enormous and almost never reject good science on the grounds of not being "important enough".
Toppling the publishing industry will certainly require a big change in how researchers currently do science. Before such fundamental shifts in peer review happen, we need better tools in general to search the academic literature and conduct scientific research online. Then, we can gradually move to a more open, qualitatively different form of online science publishing. Labmeeting.com takes that approach. (disclaimer: I work there)
If you disagree, please provide at least two examples.
Two examples:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/01/physics_hoaxers_discover_quantum_bogosity/
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
In English, where the quality of your reading and your persuasiveness is of more importance than, say, experiment design, I think peer review will become less important but still not unimportant. In the sciences, however, I think peer review is going to remain exceedingly important, and some method will remain for conducting it. Peer review at the moment is bound up (haha, I know) with paper journals, but over time one can only hope the two will be decoupled. That's when paper journals will be obsolete. The journal publishers, however, don't want this to happen, and they have enormous power over academics: you have to publish to get a job and get tenure. This fundamental power imbalance is part of the reason expensive paper journals persist. Think of this as a toll keeper problem.
As other posters have noted the problem is not journals themselves, but the cost of journals and the restrictions to access. To the extent that things like blogs make paper journals obsolete in that respect faster than would otherwise occur, a very good thing has happened and knowledge has been democratized.
[Being an old-timer,]I can in principle agree on the quality control. But the all-out American style of 'publish or perish' has resulted in some weird consequences:
1. There are thousands of academicians about with - just to give an example - 150 publications in 10 years of activity. 15 publications per year, that is one per good three weeks. Considering teaching obligations, supervisions, time for reviewing others' papers, making corrections as required by the reviewers, could take 1 week out of these three. If I have the honour to shake the hand of a person who can come up with a relevant contribution to science once a fortnight; do I shake the hand of a genius or the hand of a schemer?
2. Some will argue on the 'high impact journal'. While 'Nature' might be one of those, does this make my contribution in the [fictitious] 'Research Journal of the West Indies' any worse? Can one really exclude to encounter relevant contributions in the latter; maybe attributable to the shyness of the author?
3. More philosophically: Quality Control. The term implies that the researcher/professor needs to be controlled; or, (s)he can't be trusted to rather silently pursue the topic of inclination, the intrinsic drive, the obsession to advance what is close to one's heart?
Personally, it is a disease of our times to just not trust; to ask [Anglo-American style] for objective measures at evaluation. As a researcher for many years now, I still feel that team members can assess the contributions and qualities of another team member pretty well. Much better than a quantifiable number ('number of publications') could. Often enough, I have to observe that attainment of these so-called objective achievements takes precedence over inherent quality. Last not least because promotion or tenure are attached to quantifiable criteria.
4. The author is correct on the relatively long duration between writing and publication. But not only is the lapse in time disadvantageous; also the effort(s) required by the average author [like myself]. Personally, I am rather drawn to online, direct, peer-to-peer interaction; like in the communities of the FOSS [and Slashdot]: The feedback is normally immediate, the product or solution can be trashed out in comparatively short terms through a consolidated effort.
Being a member in quite a few of these communities, I perceive another advantage: plagiarism. Better: the relative lack thereof. Due to the direct and spontaneous interaction, there is not much of an incentive or time, to retrieve others' works just to show off.
5. When I started, a quarter of a century ago, there were a handful of relevant journals in my field; and it was possible to scan them, and be up to date. Probably one of our team would draw our attention to relevant articles.
In these days, maybe due to the pressure to publish, most articles - of course except those in some highly relevant journals - will not even be noticed; or can't be noticed. It can be asked, if people like Alexander Fleming or Einstein would necessarily have been noticed in the contemporary academic publication climate.
Despite 1-5 above, we need per-review; and even more though in these days with all and sundry crackpot being able to publish the flat-earth-theory on his or her webpage or blogsite.
I do doubt, though, that we need expensive printed journals. If one has achieved ground-breaking research - to pick up the argument from before - there is no reason to waste trees in order to distribute the results.
Where else would people turn to find reliable research on specific topics? It is true that some journals are ridiculous circles of elitism that promote only ideas the editors agree with, but there are a lot more that simply aggregate useful research. That research isn't free either. Someone spent time on it, and even submitting it to free access journals costs money. Let me repeat that: submitting research to free access journals costs money. That came straight from my adviser, who has paid for some of his papers on bivalves to be accessed freely.
Take note, I'm unpublished so I'm not pushing for one side because of that. There is value in allowing researchers within a field critique research instead of letting anything through. That doesn't mean that everything will be caught, but it's a hell of a lot more reliable that no review at all. I would like to see more free-access material but that does not mean that pay-for-access academic journals are obsolete.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Structured peer review has a somewhat simple problem caused by human nature. If your idea being correct means a lot of the "peers" reviewing your paper are wrong, then it's unlikely to be favorably reviewed, regardless of its actual merit.
For an example see string theory, no one has any real idea whether it's actually correct, and they haven't really done anything useful with it yet, but all of it's alternatives are derided as quackery. String theorists are "peers" in the review process.
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
The journals do a good job, for the most part, at keeping out well-paying stupidity. If your article is genuinely bad, you'll have a hard time getting it published anywhere high-profile. Really--you can come in with as much money as you want, and you still won't be considered relevant. If you disagree, please provide at least two examples.
The journals are not needed. There should be no censorship at all except for cases of criminal behavior. Everything should be published and the worldwide market of ideas is the right mechanism to decide what to retain and what to reject. That is why the internet is so important for the cross-pollination of ideas. Money is no object. Almost anybody and everybody who has access to a computer and the internet can publish their work, free of charge. Survival of the fittest. It is a beautiful thing.
Scientific journals, OTOH, discourage cross-pollination and encourage intellectual incest within a small group. Nobody but those within the group have the power to decide whether or not ideas generated by the group are valid. This is the reason that, even though a lot of what passes for science lately is laughable BS of the stinking kind, it is still surrounded with an aura of excellence. Why? Because the elite has managed to establish istself as the authority and uses the government (and government guns) to impose its authority on society and the classroom. It is the one true religion, all over again.
For an example see string theory, no one has any real idea whether it's actually correct, and they haven't really done anything useful with it yet, but all of it's alternatives are derided as quackery. String theorists are "peers" in the review process.
Well said. I wish I had some mod points.
First off, most 'other venues for peer review' (at least the ones that are any good) are frequently associated with journals. Second, there are many ways to evaluate the 'productivity of professors' and peer reviewed publications are only one, but an important one.
As many other people have noted, the crucial issue with journals has to do with quality control. It really does matter. Speaking as an academic with with a bit of seniority, journal publications are the first thing looked at by tenure and promotion committees and by job search committees. In the words of a very famous and senior person in my field(s), "The refereed publication is the one form of academic gold that can never be debased." As academic journals are the usual place to find refereed publications, this alone is one reason why they still matter.
That being said, there are some caveats which are in order. The first is to realize that not all 'refereed' journals are equal. A journal which has a blind refereeing process, but publishes almost anything submitted, despite this, will have a low impact rating. A publication in one of these places will not count for much. By contrast, a journal that has a 99% rejection rate will almost certainly have a high impact rating and will thus be much more impressive.
It is also the case that, having served as a journal editor, many submissions to journals are far from perfect. As a rough estimate, I would see 10-20% of submissions that came from people who were simply nuts. Without some kind of editing and refereeing process, a great deal of plain rubbish would have been in print.
Currently, academic journals are undergoing a transitional process. The turn around times are getting better, but there are still problems. For instance, as a faculty member at a State university, I am employed by the people of my State. Yet, when I have a paper accepted for publication by a journal, I have to sign over the copyright of the paper. If the people of my State, or even my students, want to read my work, they then have to pay the publishers for the right to do so. This is simply wrong and a system that will hopefully be replaced soon. Naturally, I provide anyone who asks for a copy of a paper of mine, one for free. The system is still defective though.
However, the bottom line is that peer review, and the academic journals that maintain this, are crucial for quality control. Just do a hunt on the blogs and you will see the reason why. There are quite a few 'professor' bloggers, but it is also clear that at least some of them are either frauds, or failures. Some time ago, I saw one who claimed that they could not get a paper published in any refereed journal, either good, or bad, because their paper was too 'insightful'. This is patent silliness. A better explanation was that the paper was simply unoriginal, or bad in some other way. A further reading of the same blog suggests either outright fraud, mental illness, or both. This is one of the reasons why, for all their faults, we still have academic journals. I say Thank Goodness!
What else do you call +5 informative?
Peer review is an incestuous process that works for a while but eventually engenders ridiculously hideous monsters. Examples are time travel, cats that are both dead and alive when nobody is looking, parallel universes, dimensions that curled up into little balls so tiny as to be unobservable, etc...
I'm sorry, these are supposed to be examples of the problem with peer review? It sounds like your problem is with our universe.
In the case of a catastrophic event , it would be easier to scrape knowledge from academic journal in a paper form, which need simple tools (patience, and how to read), than from a CD or hard drive which will need specialized tools (electricity, computers). Beyond that, there is no real usefulnesses of paper over electronic. When I did prepare my doctor work, I certainly wished I could search for certain term in a paper instead of reading it line per line.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
What exactly are the other venues which provide the same level of peer review that journals do? Things like Slashdot mod points are useful for surfing the web for interesting ideas, but it's far from peer reviewing. Peer reviewing really does work, on a general scale (Sokal aside). One may argue that it hinders truly ground-breaking work from making into the general scientific eye, that is sometimes right. But we need to remember that allowing the one in a million crazy-but-right idea to be published means allowing the other 999,999 crazy-and-wrong articles to be published as well, which is highly detrimental to scientific progress.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Misty eyed wacko libertarian, feigning oppression for sympathy to cover up the reasons your badly developed papers have often been refused. You can put anything out you want for anyone to read who cares to find it, and find it will be hard and only those similar to yourself will find it, amongst your crack pot ideas!
OK, so you found two examples. And in other news, murderers sometimes evade the police and the prison. Perhaps we should dissolve the (ineffective) police force?
Ezekiel 23:20
If you work for a while in any field you get a feel for "who's who" - who produces good work, who produces papers (perhaps one a decade even) that shake foundations, redefine how to look at a problem.
Superfast un peer reviewed "papers" simply add to the noise level. Academic Journals, and peer review act as a necessary filter. Disclaimer: programmer these days, one year (pre university) at a research lab - (John Innes). Probably way out of date in my thinking.
Andy
It's OK. He's got his own.
But there is a massive organization in the middle that maybe costs too much but which handles some of the important work necessary to avoid wasting people's time.
It's most egregious when the journal doesn't really do anything, and forces the author to do most of the work. Then charge massive fees all around just so they can put their snobby "Prestige" stamp on it, when in reality the publisher is nothing more than a blood sucking leech. Hopefully we'll get enough politicians in Congress who aren't 100% beholden to corporate interests, and at least mandate open access to research paid for with public dollars.
... virtually immediate obsolescence of any printed workFor example, I'm a medievalist. The people I study have all been dead for centuries, and genuinely new data are rare. Once every few years somebody will find a lost manuscript or something, but for the most part we're working with known, thoroughly studied information. Our research doesn't churn; it accretes. I routinely consult articles that are decades old, and in one instance I can think of, I actually cited an article that was over a hundred years old. New research is important too, but it tends to take the form of a new angle on existing data.
Other fields have their own tempos, I'm sure. It's a mistake to assume that all academic fields work alike.
It depends quite a bit on the publisher. For example, the prestigious Physical Review (A,B,C,...,Letters) cost quite a bit, but mainly because there are so many articles in there. If you convert it, an institutional subscription is only about $0.10 per page. An institutional subscription to Nature is much more expensive at about $0.90 per page. And Elsevier's Chemical Physics Letters (a fairly important journal in its field) is $2 per page! I think the publisher of Physical Review (American Physical Society) is a non-profit organisation, while for Elsevier, the journals are created with the sole purpose of extracting as much money from them as possible. Researchers in the field of chemical physics must have access to CPL, so the publisher can basically charge as much as they want.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
"The good news is that the internet is quickly making old style peer review obsolete."
Is it really that way? I would like to see the supporting data, like any peer reviewing a set of claims that is put forth in a publication would. That makes science concrete. You put forth a claim, and you support it with either strong theory and predictions on phenomena or with data, observations on the phenomena, and statistics.
"Most peer reviewed scientific papers are boring crap anyway."
That boring crap, my friend, is the supporting theory and observations. The aura of excellence surrounding the most laughable results is the strong scientific method. It is the same scientific method that eventually takes down the theories that become obsolete.
"Your worth should not be how many papers you've published but what have you done that is useful?"
And that is how a scientific research's value is measured really. The more your research is cited in other publications, the greater the value of your research is.
I agree that the peer rewiev process as we know it will become obsolete itself. But I don't see the world being our peer as the alternative. The next best thing may be the peer review process with human errors minimized. I'm not sure if involving more people would minimize the human errors.
Yes, it is better to just use your gut feeling to find the truthiness of a statement. Instead of studying hard to understand elitist views about why curled up dimensions explains certain phenomena or why Shrodingers dead cat points to apparent paradoxes in modern physics, just think about it for a few seconds and determined what makes sense. And then fight like hell to promote your five seconds insight on the internet, like on slashdot.
More fun than reading elitist propaganda in reviewed scientific boring papers, and one don't need to worry about elitist bias like facts and data. Me, no worry!
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
One of the advantages that paper journals have over electronic distribution is in the permanence of the source... that's especially important in 'checking the working' when someone is going through the references. It's immensely frustrating to try and check up on an interesting (or unbelievable) assertion to find a URL provided as a reference. Chances are, by the time you check it the reference has been lost, moved, reshuffled, renamed, or simply taken offline. If the reference is to a source that isn't peer reviewed (which has been amply dealt with in this thread) or fixed in some way, you even run the risk that by the time someone checks your reference it's saying something completely different from what it said when *you* checked it.
A reference to an actual paper journal ensures the permanence of the record - it's a fixed point against which you can always reliably check. Books that are out of print are still available in libraries - papers from fifty years ago are still (moderately) easily accessible in their paper forms. In twenty years time, will I even be able to read any of the digital papers I have now?
I think the two different mediums work best in combination - I almost never check out a journal article in an actual paper copy, I get them from the online 'arm' of the publisher. In that way, you get the best of both worlds - a permanent record combined with convenient access.
You are young... Life has been kind to you. You will learn...
move the goalposts much ?
He/she was asked to provide two examples.
MP3 Search Engine
It was Einstein that first observed that electrical charge could be represented mathematically as a curled up 5th dimension. Electrical charge is an observable.
Since you claim to have read some philosophy, at least Feyeraben, then you can ponder how a mathematical representation should be interpretated philosophically. For instance, there are several different mathematical identical ways of representing quantum mechanics, that seems to give different philosophical interpretations. You mentioned parallel univers or Schrodinger's cat, which are two of the more famous examples of several.
I for one would call Einstein one of the best examples of a scientist not brainwashed by his contemporaries view of physics. Still, Einstein accepted the peer review of his peers, and he studied hard at university to learn why some views have become accepted by his days physics community.
If I belong to the same group of brainwashed people like Einstein who feel curled up dimensions is a very interesting interpreation of experimental data, I have no problem with that.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
If I belong to the same group of brainwashed people like Einstein who feel curled up dimensions is a very interesting interpreation of experimental data, I have no problem with that.
I do. Einstein or not, physicists have made no progress in understanding the mechanism of gravity in close to a century. They still have no clue as to why bodies fall. To do so, they would need to go beyond Einstein and may even need to step on Einstein. Unfortunately, the elitist peer review system that you admire so much will never allow it, seeing that Einstein is now worshipped as a god by the members of the elite. Einstein tried to explain gravity in terms of the geometry of spacetime but did you know that nothing can move in spacetime? That is right. This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper wrote in "Conjectures and Refutations" that spacetime is "Einstein's block universe in which nothing ever happens." Popper was comparing spacetime to Parmenides' block universe, the same Eleatic guy who taught (with his famous pupil Zeno) that change does not exist.
So, this is what peer review gets you, a block universe where nothing changes. ahahaha... Too funny. Where is Thomas Kuhn when we need him? We need a new revolution in physics.
Academic journal are still, or even increasingly important in many areas of science, even though stuff that is published in them is essentially known before it is printed.
Before an article makes it into a journal, its content is usually published online as a report (either through the home institution or on arxiv), then at one or two conferences (where papers are reviewed too, but more quickly). By the time it gets reviewed for a journal, competent reviewers usually have heard of some of its content, which is good.
The journal paper however usually contains more data, more details, more discussion and better results than the previous incarnations. It has also been scrutinised and criticised a whole lot more. It has probably been revised completely at least once. This is a very different "product" than the initial report or conference stuff.
Nowadays the whole review process is online and often double-blind.
If a journal article has taken 2 years to be published it was probably because the authors didn't do a very good job of writing the first version of the article. The whole idea is to make the article's material into a reference.
Most researchers will then look up the article through web interfaces such as the IEEE's, the ACM's, the web of science, etc.
Scientists go through this trouble (they are both the authors, the reviewers and the editor -- not all at one of course) because it is worth it. No one has found a better system. After it is published, a good article will get cited often, and so the meritocratic aspect of science doesn't stop at publication.
In addition, the value of individual scientists is estimated through their paper output: the number of papers published, how often they are cited. Scientist have a strong incentive to publish quality new research, which is as it should be.
Eventually, if the stuff is good, it ends up as a book chapter, or even a whole book.
This is for image analysis and computer vision stuff BTW. It may vary significantly in other areas.
So no, journals are not obsolete. Since they are now easily indexed and searchable, they have become even more valuable and valued. What has changed is that institution have been able to bargain prices down, since paper issues are rarely used now and so the cost of running a journal has gone down. Journals that have an easy and relatively cheap subscription model have been able to get more mindshare, their "impact factor" have gone up, and their value as well. For instance, it is perfectly possible for an individual to subscribe to the IEEE and get some or most of its online library access at a reasonable price. This was unthinkable only a few years ago.
I'll say just one thing: most probably those are trying to call these obsolete, who never manage to publish anything. That said, faster publication times should be desirable, but not in any way shall we dismiss these journals so quickly.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I guess what we have established is that you fall into the group of people who should not read philosophy.
To cover some of your thoughts here, Zeno's paradoxes have been resolved by modern math and its concept of limits. Karl Popper's book I have not read, but I can see that it would be an interesting comparision Popper could make between Einstein's general relativity and Parmenides philosophy. It seems like the elitist Popper talked above your head though.
Last, Einstein's general relativity is beauty itself in combining several phenomena into one model, together with simplisity of arguments. Not to forget that the model by Einstein explains phenomena that Newton's gravity model had problems to explain.
Even scientists who think Einstein lost his marbles by not accepting quantum mechanics, don't have a problem to recognise this. If you want to feel suprior to Einstein by trying to make phony philosophical arguments to deny motion in a space-time continium, then more power to you.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
To cover some of your thoughts here, Zeno's paradoxes have been resolved by modern math and its concept of limits.
Yeah. So says the elite. I don't buy any of it, of course, since I think it's all crap, and by this, I mean both Zeno and modern mathematicians' "refutation" of Zeno. Zeno and Parmenides only proved that the universe is discrete even though they did not see it that way. Mathematicians cling to a continuous universe even though it leads to an infinite regress. Again, more incestuous crap that passes elitist peer review.
more power to you.
And less to you and the elitists and their clueless sycophants. See ya.
The IEEE and Wiley (the ones I have experience with) are bastards. They charge money for doing almost nothing.
The most important part is peer-review and it is always done for free. I don't know if they even pay the editor, but from my experience, this is also done for free.
They have very little work, mostly some minor desktop publishing work, since when you submit the work, it is already in their preferred format.
There are some publishing houses that are going for open and free access. Furthermore, I know that in the Netherlands is now mandatory to provide free access to all published scientific work. I don't know the details but it is a great initiative.
As a final note, most scientific work is funded by public funds and these publishing houses are reaping profits from this public funding.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Scientific journals have been obsolete since they were invented in the 17th Century. They force people to create fixed units of information (on print or digital paper) that immediately become out of date and which can no longer reflect the current thinking of the author or the author's readers.
The processes by which these "pages" of information (and increasingly, the supporting data) are created, distributed, reviewed, and consumed, however, continue to evolve. That's what keeps this complex system of creativity, peer review, communication, education, quality control, scientific socialization, and information dissemination alive.
Dennis McDonald
Alexandria, Virginia
http://www.ddmcd.com/managing-technology/category/journals
web site: http://www.ddmcd.com
Anyone who's ever wondered why Wikipedia are such querulous hardarses about verifiable third-party references, no original research and notability, please reread the parent comment until you achieve cognition.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The researchers and the university spend a lot of effort and money to get results, and the publisher gets the copyright to the article for free. Then the same university that produced the article have to buy the journal back for big $⣠from the privately owned publisher.
Practically the whole business is owned by a handful of companies, the 800lb pound gorilla being Elsevier. Wiley and others come way behind.
Yes, peer review is pivotal to academic research but the system is idiotic. Many libraries cannot afford all the journals they need to stay current. It's even worse for poorer countries.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
That doesn't make him wrong. Viewed as a parlor game, of course he lost, because he made the tactical mistake of setting the goalposts too close. However, I don't think its reasonable to conclude that academic journals play a useful role if and only if there are fewer than two cases of monetary interests trumping academic ones. Why two? Why not one, or ten?
The problem is that if this is a game, the game is broken.
It should work like this: A proposes an instance where monetary interests did NOT trump academic instances. B then proposes an instance where monetary instances DID trump academic ones. This process repeats in rounds until one or the other runs out of instances. The player at the end of the game who has instances remaining wins. Naturally, this is a very crude game, but not so crude as the "name two" version.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But even with these flaws, the process does a pretty good job at rejecting junk; [...] for humanity to reliably accumulate knowledge, we need a mechanism that rejects almost all obvious junk, and the scientific journals are the ones who are still doing a pretty good job of that.
[...] If another *good* peer review mechanism appears, it could supplant journals, but none have yet. None of your arguments are for journals however. They are for proper peer review. With an online process, reviewed and rejected articles can be published (with reasoning if you like). This adds to the wealth of knowledge.
If I'm planning to do an experiment it helps to know that others have tried and failed to provide a verifiable result or that certain methodologies are seen to be flawed. We learn by our mistakes and our successes, if we can also learn by others mistakes then we can surely accelerate towards greater understanding?
I'd like to see a government science program wherein the results (by which I mean papers, studies, raw data, etc.) of all government sponsored science goes into an open online peer-reviewed repository. Unreviewed works and works in progress could be added in, updates could even be made in light of new theories or experiments.
Are academic journnals obsolete? [1] So in conclusion, further research is needed.
[1] To do; add 8,000 words of waffle and a few diagrams here.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Kary Mullis (Nobelprize winner for PCR) still keeps his rejection letters from Nature and Science for his PCR invention...
"With the ability to get information anywhere in the world in seconds, and the virtually immediate obsolescence of any printed work..." There are two problems with these assertions. First, we have the ability to get data anywhere in the world in seconds -- the information therein may or may not be the result of painstaking hours of research, frustration, and revelation. Second, the only printed works that is virtually obsolete immediately after press are those which contain dynamic information. Typical academic journals are somewhat less dynamic in nature -- solid exploration of theory and law takes time and hard work. Your two foundational assertions, being rubish, makes the rest of your post useless to the rest of us.
"Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted"
With a significant other in a PhD program who publishes frequently, I can tell you this statement is grossly inaccurate.
Random Musing: Is it considered bad etiquette on Slashdot to have to ASK to have an article to read?
The prof. I work for is currently scrambling to get one of his 3 papers out to either Science or Nature. Why? Because it will partially determine whether he gets tenure or not.
So at least in most research universities, journals are not even close to being dead but are as alive and necessary as ever.
thrilled you're aware of the science wars, but honestly, i'd have been more thrilled with an alternative for a working system than 'exposing' those two idiotic examples and saying we should do away with the whole practice. (yes, i know you didn't say that explicitly, but i don't really see what it proves, other than that the author made a somewhat naÃve claim)
there will always be people like Leibniz (Monadology), or cultural scientists who are pissed at not getting recognition, or others pissed at the same thing.
Monadology is still read, and there are also people getting BAs for writing a paper combining Husserl and mysticism.
Did that cloning guy from Sth-Korea prove that medicine should be abolished? Honestly, i can't get too worked up over a few papers a year being published that are about absolutely nothing, or other papers that are exposed as frauds in another few, because it will turn out (via citation counters) that noone is reading/referencing them, and they will be fired by their universities (or not)
Remember that news article about a "God Gene" having been found a few years ago?
turned out the article the papers were talking about didn't even exist/was never published.
anyone can make a mistake..
Continued use of whatever is said in those articles will prove that a writer is useful, and the market will take care of the rest.
I'd cite something from http://scx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/3/304 but I can't afford to read it
The academic journals are expensive intermedaries. The subscriptions are costly. Contributors receive no compensation, often pay page charges, and surrender the copyright on their work to the publishers. Editors are not paid.
While the cost of typesetting technical documents has plummeted, subscription prices remain stratospheric. This is a rich vein of high profits for publishers.
It is time for this outmoded and expensive system to change. Peer reviewed documents should be distributed electronically. Taxpayer-financed research results should be publicly and freely available.
Print distribution and publication of research results is cumbersome, delay-ridden and expensive. The current system impedes the spread of knowledge with expensive copyright trollery, instead of accelerating and enhancing it. Let's all upgrade this enterprise to the 21st century world.
Two examples from high-profile journals. Social Text, even in its field, isn't high-profile.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Minor point of order: Fermat was not that far ahead of his time. He inspired Newton when he developed the calculus, but he was an *amateur* mathematician (lawyer by profession), and he sometimes didn't write his proofs down. So it's probably fairer to say that it took hundreds of years to accomplish what Fermat attempted and thought he had solved.
So later mathematicians (Gauss for example) sometimes questioned whether had proved them at all, given how difficult their own efforts had been.
Hasan
I can tell you as an author and a reviewer, that in many fields double-blind doesn't mean much in reality. If you are one of only a few people studying a certain topic, it can be pretty obvious who is the author. Personally, I think Peer Review of journals is a good idea, although there are numerous examples of idiocy, forged data, plagiarism that has been published, and great works that have been rejected. What I do find troubling with some traditional journals is the time from submission to print. I had a article take 2 years to get published that was technology-related. By the time it was published, it was obsolete and not worth reading. Still counted for the tenure track though (although not as much as it would have been since with it being outdated, it wasn't cited much). Traditional journals need to come up with quicker turn around times (especially in the sciences and social sciences) or they will be overtaken by journals that do provide a faster review process.
I find him amusing as all hell!
Go ahead... Laugh along with Louis Savain!
And this statement is a perfect example of why peer review is necessary. You point out "ridiculously hideous monsters" without really understanding what they mean. Because quantum mechanics is my specialty, I'll speak to the "cats that are both dead and alive when nobody is looking." I don't think that anyone really believes the cat is both dead and alive. Schrodinger's cat was proposed as a paradoxical situation to express problems with a particular interpretation of Quantum mechanics. In other words, Scientists themselves were trying to clarify a difficulty with their own theories. Peer review helps to filter the noise of folks making ridiculous statements caused by misinterprations.
"Science, even bullshit science, is big money."
...
*looks at paycheck*
*looks at dented, rusted '96 Dodge Intrepid in parking lot*
*looks at bank account*
*looks at paycheck*
*looks at the lab's 95% ethanol stock*
THe problem is, the "free market of ideas" gives us Astrology, Jesus on flatbread, etc. At risk of sounding elitist, "the masses" tend to believe stories that are easy to understand, and evoke the least cognitive dissonance. I think this is actually the reason that the climate change and evolution naysayers have managed to get such a foothold as of late; any old scientific quack can put up a web page.
Jeremy
The peer-review process is not blind to "The Editor", who chooses the reviewers. If the editor decides to send your paper to the three biggest jerks he knows, so be it. Tough for you, after you've put a year of your time into an article, with the tenure clock running. The process is biased, but I haven't seen anything good to replace it. Open source journals? Tenure based on the number of times your article is cited? I'm open to suggestions.
On this site one can post papers in Math, Physics, etc. There is some screening, but not much. On top of that, there are "overlay" journals, which which state that certain papers on arxiv.org have been peer reviewed. This seems pretty close to ideal in many ways. Papers that are not peer-reviewed are available to the world, but we have the added quality control of peer-review, IF we want it. It certainly can be helpful, since I have found papers on arxiv.org that are completely wrong. The peer-reviewers also know that literature and can save you time if you're new to a subject. The problem, if there is one, is to get people to do the work of peer-review. However, printed journals do not pay reviewers (nobody ever paid me), so it's mostly a question of the social and professional rewards of doing the work.
Based upon journal reviewer's comments, my experience has been that one in five reviewers reads, understands, and makes useful comments on the paper. Two of five reviewers review only for grammar and style concerns. The other two partially understand the paper. This process takes 1 year. If you try resubmitting, it takes another year. (Disclaimer: I only submitted 3 times before I got disgusted and quit.)
One of my undergraduate advisers told me some of the younger professors and he had problems getting papers published so they started their own journal. Now they don't have a problem. Hence, if you want to publish a lot of papers, strive to be an editor of the journal you want to publish in. Also, network and try to become friends with as many editors as possible. Don't try to publish to a journal unless one of the authors or your organization is on friendly terms with some of the editors. Your relationship with the editors may be more important than the content of your paper. Also, it is necessary to review recent publications of a journal to see what the editors think is trendy. If your article is not in the same trend, then find a different journal to submit to.
Although, in my opinion, online publishing of an abstract and a fee of 30 dollars for a 4 page paper is the same as not publishing the paper.
Journals exist for one reason and one reason only: assistant professors and graduate students are in a constant competitor to publish papers in order to earn tenure and notoriety. This results in academic members essentially giving their work away for free to journals who in turn make piles of money off of it. Fix the tenure track system and paper journals will disappear in place of free to view online ones.
Just use http://akismet.com/ to reject the junk, open the content up to the world, and we'll all be better off.
Well, at least all of us except for the journals.
While i am no fan of citatin analysis, I think something like half of all articles never get a single citation - they have no importance whatsoever. So why are they published ? So what if there is peer review - noone cares.
Most working scientist that I know bother to read a few top journals (in molecular biology, CELL, under the editorship of Ben Lewin, was top) because they know that quality control makes it worth their while; the other 99% of journals are looked at only when a specific need arises
Profit motive While there are a few "nonprofit" journals run by learned societys, the vast majority of journals are for profit. the publishers know that there are a small number of librarys that will subscribe to almost anything, so its like money for old rope: you start the journal of computational studies in ancient amerindian languages, and a small number of librarys will get a sub; you then just price it right.
Tenure - even if the article is a waste of paper, the promotion process demands articles - I have had senior people, in charge of tenure rev, say many people on those committes simply weigh the supplicants output
history - we have not yet moved from the ancient, typeset ways to the future
No. Just no.
à_à
Ignatius J. Reilly? Is that you?
Judging by the way these posts were moderated, it is obvious that the original poster is right about elitism and peer review in science. He must have struck a sensitive nerve. Peer review in scientific journals is synonymous with ass review. Simply kiss the asses of the elite and you get published. Ass simple ass that that. :-D
"And that is how a scientific research's value is measured really. The more your research is cited in other publications, the greater the value of your research is."
Well, one quite good way to get cited is to have a result published, which is wrong, but for some reason at least is wrong in an interesting way. So, no, more cited works are typically not better, although a certain correlation exists.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
And that is exactly why journals are and will continue to be relevant.
The Internet is a giant cesspool with a few islands of trustworthiness, many of which are associated with more traditional mediums anyway (like electronic journals).
When you read something in a good scientific journal not only do you know that someone took the time to write a decent paper but that two to five acknowledged experts in the field agreed that the paper was worthy of publication.
Why only the 95%? Go for the good stuff, man!
One word: azeotrope.
Oh, and they *don't want* people drinking it. I know it was a JOKE.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
>There are certainly other venues for peer review,
>so why journals?
What... like slashdot? Do you want a *web 2.0* peer review?
Journals aren't democratic, they are peer review by experts, not Joe Blow.
I agree that electronic distribution of existing journals would be nice... but realistically the high cost of journals and the publishing time can't go down, because those are costs and time associated with the peer review.
> Go ahead... Laugh along with Louis Savain!
I suppose it's possible he's some kind of misunderstood genius... not likely, but possible.
But until he grows up, we will never know.
To quote Carl Sagan, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers-- but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
As one of those senior faculty, I'll be the first to admit that there are benefits to the existing peer review process in publishing. However,
1. there are ways to implement peer review that do not require working with big publishing houses, and
2. much of the peer reviewing for journals is not exactly "peer" review anyway. Most of the reviewers for most of the journals are junior faculty, just getting started in the profession, trying to build their resume.
We should not forget the publishers of the journals we are talking about. There are two primary sources: commercial publishing houses, like Elsevier, and professional societies, like the American Psychological Association, which are supposedly non-profit organizations.
Elsevier reported $746 Million in profits for FY07. That's profit, not revenues. And how much did they pay reviewers? Or authors?
The U.S. Congress mandated recently that all journal articles reporting results of NIH-funded research be made available for free access within one year of publication. That is obviously a step forward. But, of course, it needs to be expanded to encompass ALL federal- and state-funded work, of every type.
But even with that goal, about half of all research reports would not be free access, because a large amount of research is funded by companies and non-government organizations.
Until academic institutions and faculty take seriously their commitment to retention of their intellectual property, rather than signing it away, the old journal publication structure will survive.
Harvard faculty took the radical step recently of declaring that institutional control would be retained for all social sciences publications as well -- not just those derived from federally-funded projects, but all of them. (Faculty can request variation from the rule on a case by case basis.) Harvard has the clout to do such things, but even so, it will not change the geography of scholarly publishing until a large number of universities unite to force the issue.
Are scholarly journals as we know them dying? Yes, they just aren't yet aware that they are terminal. And just like the music industry giants, they will fight to their last breath trying to maintain their archaic system rather than innovate, guaranteeing their eventual demise.
That is a good example. Wouldn't it advance the flow of human knowledge if most, or all, of peer-reviewed research was available online, for free? Keep the review, but vastly improve the access. Especially important to do if the research gets any government funding.
Ezekiel 23:20
He might be right about parallel computer architecture (but he's completely loco about saying it is "much simpler" than standard programming).
There is absolutely nothing of value for the physics or biology communities on his rebelscience website.
Add water when mixing with orange juice, otherwise one ends up drinking a beaker of burning pulp!!!
Wow. You should definitely learn some topology before making a fool of yourself again.
Deliberately create a "slave labour" pool of grad students that first have to climb an artificially high mountain to enter the promised land....
Take the simple matter of defining terms... the amount time I have wasted in my life because some paper didn't define fully the terms he was talking about.
Some "standard" quantity... except it's a different standard quantity in this paper to that paper. Crap. Get over it, waste a paragraph and explicit define wtf you talking about.
So you just want to know what the "diff" is. That's what the executive summary is for. Now do the work of making the paper to stand up on it's own as a readable understandable entity.
Sure you need the references, but they are leads, fair attribution, and cross checks. Not paper saving devices to save you from typing a few lines of equations.
Who needs a paper copy anyway? 99% of the papers you're going to digitally search / rapidly scan read, and only 1% do you want to print and study at leisure. So it's just online bytes, not expensive library shelf space. Hell, there are more bytes in ye average students porn collection than the entire physics department journals.
Very little imagination is required to imagine a far better UI on the body of knowledge academics are being publically funded to create.
Very good! The two examples are quite instructive. First, there is *no demonstration of financial pressure*. You showed examples of not keeping out stupidity, period. These are not examples of well-paying stupidity getting in where impoverished stupidity is rejected.
And, on the one hand, you have an example of a cultural studies journal. Cultural studies is not an exceedingly specialized discipline; its research methodology and modes of analysis are reasonably accessible. The fact that Sokal got his paper published--in a reasonably prestigious journal, no less--suggests that cultural studies are not actually science, or at least that the subfield that Sokal was parodying was pretty widely ignored as useless or irrelevant.
On the other, you have a paper in an arcane branch of an arcane subfield of physics being accepting an incomprehensible paper into a relatively prominent journal. These areas of physics are rather inaccessible, and this suggests to me that the useless-or-irrelevant explanation is somewhat more likely. Or it may be that that particular branch of theoretical physics is not science given that it's almost hopelessly untestable.
So, fair enough, on the edges of what is considered science, you find stuff that is at best questionable and at worst not science at all, and you can publish nonsense there if you try and have no particular financial backing. This is not particularly troubling to me, nor does it show that the journal process doesn't work in general--only that it is not utterly immune to all the regular problems with human endeavors (just reasonably resistant).
If you would like to demonstrate that financial motives bias the choice of papers, please provide two examples.
Or, if you would like to demonstrate that this phenomenon is worrying for science in general, please provide examples like those above which were published in a field that is clearly a science (i.e. has heavy contact with experiment and falsification).
I wasn't setting goalposts in order to play a parlor game--though if I did, I did ask in the context of coming in with large amounts of money and that making the difference (which here it did not). Rather, it was to see what kind of examples came up, if any, and to see if they were worrying or not.
You don't want to run a game where you look for roughly equal numbers of cases with or without monetary interests, since if anything like half the papers that are accepted are accepted for financial reasons (beyond the generic "we need to publish articles since we are in the publishing business", which still allows you to control quality if you pick carefully) the peer review system is in horrible trouble.
The game played should be one where you figure out whether it's common or not relatively quickly.
As a former professor (cardiac electrophysiology) I agree that the major problem with the journal system is the cost of retrieving the data. There are dozens of journals relevant to my specialty and the cost to subscribe to each one would be prohibitive. On average we are talking around $300 per year per journal. The cost is purely the cost of publication: peer reviewers are not paid a cent for their reviews. Most journals have online editions, but you don't have the option to buy just the online version. You have to pay full price and be a party to the destruction of numerous trees. But it is the free flow of ideas that is at stake. Trying to look up a recent article online and not being able to read it because it you don't subscribe to the obscure journal it was printed in is a bit of a shock for someone attuned to the open source philosophy of sharing of information. People profiteering from other people's research and inhibiting information flow that might actually save a patient's life is not right. Just as research is funded for the public good, so should publication of that research.
Sig expected Real Soon Now.
While these are examples of sloppy peer review (and I don't know the reputation of the journals involved), neither of these has anything to do with the possibility to _buy_ your way into a respectable journal.
It is clear that sometimes bad articles get accepted, and sometimes good articles get rejected -- nobody is disputing this. However, I really don't see how money would affect this, given how the process is set up. There simply is no way to pay the reviewers.