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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?"
"Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
Depends how you define productivity. If it means the ability to publish then yes. If you mean the ability to produce useful and/or interesting work then no.
The vast majority of published articles are literature reviews, rehashes of previous papers, boring but easy research about things that are already well documented, or statistical juggling with dubious data from equally dubious research. Perhaps one in a thousand is both good, true, original and honest. The rest are just badly written dross.
Peer review counts for very little. A small inner circle publish (or at least have their name appended to) 90% of papers in any one discipline and they act as peer reviewers for themselves on a "You scratch my back I'll scratch yours" basis.
The "Publish or perish" mentality has completely debased and largely destroyed good science. Tenure depends on quantity of publications not quality and so vast reams of garbage are generated every month making it really difficult to find the needle in the haystack of irrelevant tripe.
The Cutter
It's easier to detect, but is anything actually being done? I have a third hand account of a story that illustrates this. It's going to be vague as I don't remember names and dates, but whatever. My friend was doing research for his physics prof for his undergrad studies. The work was on string theory. His prof had a partner. Well, after some time the partner took whatever information he had, ran off with it, renamed it something else, and won a Nobel Prize for it. Despite the fact that the work was incomplete and had errors, named something that didn't accurately depict what the work was, and was shown to be stolen, no one cared. That particular professor didn't do all of the work. But instead he gets full credit. So where's the point in being able to detect plagiarism if no one cares enough to do it?
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.