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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?"
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.
...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
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 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.
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!)
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
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.
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.
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