Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Peer review can be done online. Journals seem like a more expensive and time-consuming way of peer review that the Internet will probably supplant soon.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
...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
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...
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.
Peer review works for Digg. They don't take 2 years to publish an article!
Peer review does effectively happen online. After an article is submitted to a journal and vetted by the editors, it is sent, usually electronically, to selected reviewers. Reviewers then submit their critique electronically. There isn't a lot of mailing of manuscripts. That, like you say, is fairly pointless in an electronic age. Critique in a forum doesn't happen, but that would be fairly impractical for a scientific article. Besides, there isn't any direct communication between reviewers and submitters. It is blind, and there isn't a lot of traffic in general--just the manuscript to be sent and the review to be received.
I do think there is an important role for journals...it allows scientific themes and significant advances to be followed more easily. Somebody else (the editors) has screened a lot of submissions--looking for things like relevance to the journal, significance of data, a well-told story, etc--before it ever makes it to print, so the reader doesn't have to wade through a ton of crap to get to the interesting article he is looking for. The economics of journals will probably certainly change, but journals themselves will remain for the near future. And nothing stops a PI from publishing their findings online if it doesn't make it into a journal. It's just that fewer people are likely to see it that way.
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.
Some people don't like wading through unreviewed papers. Even though I read Slashdot, OS News, Ars Technica and a few others, I still buy a copy of Linux Format every so often. Peer review is a nice idea, and I'm not saying that a published journal is inherently better or more effective, but often peer review can totally miss something. Peer review is subject to groupthink - Slashdot is a prime example, if you look in the Firehose, or how comments are rated. Recently, there was that article on Slashdot about cold fusion. Turned out to be very under tested and probably a load of crap, but peer review saw that it was big news.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Don't forget, these publications are also a source of money to the publishing bodies. 99% of searches for modern scientific data ends up at one of several sites, and all you can see is an abstract. To see anything more, you need to pay cold hard cash. So, really, these publishing bodies are actually slowing down the advancement of mankind!
Same is true for "standards". (ISO or otherwise). IMHO, if they want to call it a standard, it really should be free. (Especially considering that the standards bodies have the "standard" written by people/companies giving their time for free!)
Is it time to move to online-only publications to save costs and speed up distribution?
That's a pointless idea. I like the interbutts as much as the next guy, but you need to realize that the distribution phase of academic publishing takes only a small fraction of the time of producing a work. Most of that time is spent by the peer review process, which is already done electronically.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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
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
Most people who do reviewing are knowledgeable to the point of expertise in their field (This can be questioned but the reviewers are at least grad students who have published on the topic once). The people on slashdot - not so knowledgeable about high energy physics.
blog plug -> The Darker Side of Light
Even more importantly, why is it necessarily a bad thing if it 'hinders technological advancement'?
Technological advancement in and of itself isn't automatically a good thing. In fact, unless informed with scholarly scrutiny, it can rapidly become a bad thing. I am not speaking here as a luddite. A luddite chants 'all bad' just like a technophile chants 'all good.' The truth is more complicated than that.
Aww, are you butt hurt that your brilliant crank works have been rejected time and time again? Surprise surprise.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
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!
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.
"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.
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.
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!
Blind my ass--I wish scientists would stop lying about this. I've been in academia long enough (and it doesn't take long once you get to the level where people hand you preprints of papers) to know that the only time your paper is "blind" is the first two or three out there. After that the peer review process goes to peers who have read your past work and know what you're working on, and effectively recognize who you are based on when they get the manuscript and what the topic is.
Sorry, but you asshats have to stop propagating this myth and start trying to find ways to correct the realpolitik that corrupts your journals and institutions--because as it stands now, most journals are just another corporate business ran by some guy with the letters "PhD" after his/her name.
I disagree. Insofar as people should be able to hear and decide to beleive in any info they want, this "worldwide market of ideas" is a good thing...except that there is a lot of junk out there, and without the peer review process there is little to no evolutionary pressure on these ideas to force shitty ones to the bottom and good ones to the top. The actual pressure is provided by people who yell loudest that they are correct (which does, contrary to your assertion, correlate rather well with how much money you can throw at the problem).
Your approach would tend to minimize the advancement of good ideas and encourage the advancement of bad ones.
Your problem is that you think the problems you see with science are new ("...Youth sees the sun rise and forgets the previous day ever existed..."). This has always been how it is, because the alternatives are all worse. Few scientists and their ideas are respected in their time, and as many find fame for their ignominious deaths as their notable achievements. Science is conservative for a reason; you would have us err so that your ideas (or ideas you are sympathetic to) get equal time with well-established ones.
I'm starting to think you're just a really clever creationist or something.
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.
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.
Some guy claims to have made an anti-gravity machine with a cat and some buttered toast? That's still news for nerds!
The internet has made the transmission and distribution of information cheap. I would go so far as to say nearly free.
However, there remains one very large barrier to the use of that information: the recipient still bears the burden of evaluating and interpreting it. Access is cheap. Assessment is still expensive. Search engines, broadband, all the amazing technology of my MacBookPro and its software haven't solved the real problem: How the heck do I decide which information matters?
In fact, if anything, the glut of cheap information makes it harder for effective assessment, not easier. Ever try to concentrate when fifty people are shouting at you?
Where does this leave the academic journal? I'm not sure, but I'm skeptical. The academic journal and, more importantly, the institutions of the larger academic system which use it as an indicator of intellectual worth, are profoundly limited. Every discipline I know has examples of what would eventually become foundational articles that get rejected over and over again by the arbiters of mainstream intellectual and scientific fashion. More seriously, thousands of valuable assistant professors have likely had their careers and ideals misshaped by the pursuit of publish-or-perish. And perhaps most importantly of all, there is the real problem of timely responsiveness. When the world and its needs are changing, and accelerating, as fast as today's, institutions of interpretation -- must move and adapt fast.
And quick adaptation is not something that the academic world is at all good at.
Yet, the marketplace of ideas does still require filters. I have a great deal of faith in markets, especially as the cheap information of the Internet age makes those markets more and more responsive to people's desires and needs. Yet the effectiveness of markets remains constrained by the limits of those very desires and needs. Deference to peer review when all of your peers are sophomores ("sophisticated morons") is not going to help very much. Ignorance shared is still ignorance.
In its editors and referees, the current journal system has a group of people with very high level filtering expertise. Whatever new institutions that replace the academic journal must replace that filtering expertise. Search engines, etc., can't do that. Sophomores can't do that.
I don't mean to deify those editors and referees. They aren't the only ones with the expertise, or even necessarily the ones with the most expertise. But its sometimes hard for people outside the system to understand how much of their time and effort those editors and referees have to allocate, to do that filtering, to to develop the skills that make their filtering expert, and to assess and evaluate their fellow filterers.
True "deep" peer review requires all three things, and all three things take a lot of time and expense. Time and expense that aren't significantly reduced just because the cost of information transmission has started to approach zero.
Listen. Think. Repeat.
Rants of this author can also be ignored at www.listenthinkrepeat.com/wordpress.
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
Well, there are basically four options.
1) You can do it in a program other than LaTeX, which is like a stab in the eye with a sharp stick, generally. (Some math programs make fairly nice equations.) If the format isn't Word, or perhaps if it is, this is a fancy version of (2).
2) You can hand-write it. I don't know offhand of a journal that accepts handwritten articles, but a number of them accept hard-copy images and graphics. A handwritten equation many typesetters are likely to get wrong a couple of times.
3) You write it in some understandable form so the typesetter is sure of what you mean. You might as well use (4).
(4) Use LaTeX.
Hell, when we were e-mailing one another discussing theoretical physics, to write equations we just wrote the LaTeX code. It's not like the e-mail client would render it, but everyone knew how to read and write LaTeX-formatted equations.