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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?"
Quality control and that journals are recognizable and until now, financially viable.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
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?
One consequence of this is that plagarism is easier to detect. Even when it is not outright theft but an author trying to game the system by double publishing work it shows up quickly in search queries. I'm aware of (reviewed) two papers recently that were rejected because another reviewer spotted the previous publication of the work.
The submitter doesn't seem to know as much about academia as he believes. What kind of scientific publication is "obsolete"? More importantly when does that change occur?
The purpose of restricting published work to that which has passed peer review is to ensure that results do not become obsolete. They must uphold the same quality standards that we expect from all scientific disciplines - not blog-style fads that have become popular and at some stage will cease to be popular. The body of the literature should contain timeless observations that have resulted from hard study. These do not become obsolete, even if they are superceded by better methods.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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.
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.
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
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!)
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
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.
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.
Information is processed data. It is anything that can help reduce uncertainty in the decision-making process. It has nothing to do with the complexity of the issue.
Example:
18.6
You can read it all you want, and analyze it all you want, and it would still be just raw data to you, without any meaning. But if I told you that this is the temperature, in degrees celsius, at my city right now, it would still be a useless piece of data for you. But for me, it's a great piece of information: now I know that I should wear a little more than just a t-shirt.
[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.
... 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.
Well I figured it was sarcasm, but it's been said before that there's no (official) way in English to denote sarcasm in text. Even if there were, there's no way to tell humorous sarcasm apart from snide sarcasm :P. I find it better to assume there is no sarcasm, and look like an idiot, than perceive everything as sarcasm, and get paranoid.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Nature (Publishing Group) tried an interesting experiment back in 2006 where they solicited authors to participate in an "Open Peer Review". The jist: most of the editors and the authors found some interesting comments, but the comments were not as helpful as the traditional review process. Additionally, as one might expect, when everyone has the opportunity/responsibility to critique a work, few people actually did. Some interesting nuggets about the review process at Nature as well....
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.
Any decent university will have an electronic subscription to all but the most obscure journals. If you don't work at or in conjunction with a university or at another research lab that subscribes to the important journals of the field then you can always GO to a university library, sit down at one of their computers and pull down pdfs to your heart's content. For free.
Slowing down the advancement of mankind? I doubt it very much.