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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?"
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.
I've been in both sides, reviewer and reviewed. Unluckily, they never control who's doing such peer review. If there is some sort of control of it. Then yes, but many times, advisers give papers to their students to review them. At the end, a poor review can do very bad things. One, hide a good paper from others, just because the reviewer is a complete ignorant (or an idiot), or two, accept and give credit for something really stupid (I've seen papers that I hit my head against a wall asking why they accepted such thing).
If they can come up with a great idea about reviewing papers, that doesn't deal with these problems:
1. Well known names. Some people tend to believe that if one of the authors is famous, the paper has to be good and that's retarded. (This normally can be solved by blinded/ double blinded review).
2. Certify that the reviewers take time and have the knowledge to read the papers. Sometimes people from the area you're working on, believe they know everything about other areas, even if they don't have a clue. So, trying to use some theory from other areas, result in people talking no sense about what they thing is done.
3. Verify the results of the evaluation. Some people is just too lazy that they either accept or reject, without even carefully reading it. Some, because afraid of their ignorance, accept stupid papers, some because of their pedantry reject everything because nothing is good for them.
So, yes, quality control is important. But, literally thousands of probably papers vanish during a year because of a poor review. Although I think, you're right, I think, journals should change and be oriented to make the information available but index the information depending on some scoring or ranking system according to evaluation and grading from users in the network. That would be a great filter.