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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?"
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
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...
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?
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.
This question isn't even asking the right questions, just (I'm guessing) pushing an anti-journal agenda. One inaccuracy:
> Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,
Any journal that takes that long in the hard sciences wouldn't stay in print. Their own requirements are that the work be timely. I've had papers pulled because our team took too long (3 months) to submit a rewrite.
Now, an article _might_ take 2 years from 'first blog post announcing a discovery' to 'peer-accepted academic paper', but that's because the _research_, not the paper process, takes time to be both complete and thorough. I can blog "I discovered X", but any paper needs to explain why I know it's X and not Y, what the confidence levels are, and how it compares with competing explanations. In short, you have to analyze, write and edit.
The actual submission process for, say, Astrophysics Journal can go by in 3 months from submission to publication if the writing team is keeping up with the requested edits.
I will also point out ADS (at ads.harvard.edu) has provided free searchable access to astronomy journals since 1992. Further, most (if not all) astronomy journals require electronic submission (and review rounds are electronic too). So for that area of science, journals are ideal: timely, thorough, and vetted.
A.
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!)
Uninformed readers voting on something is to peer review what being beaten to death by apes is to getting a good massage.
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.
Not only is it free, it has a high impact rating in the UK, so we can even publish there without having our careers impacted. Backed by the Institute of Physics, it is an example of what journals could easily become in time. I doubt that much in there will be of interest to the /. community, but it's a harbinger of things to come across all fields, I hope. I would expect that within 10-20 years, there'll be very few, if any pay-to-publish-and-pay-to-read journals.
In the same way that HEP has been using linux now for at least a decade, we are getting there with publishing too. Let's hope we can have some more examples here of other serious sciences with open-access journals.
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
As an academic myself, I can only say it would be utter madness to do away with academic journals. Peer review, though sometimes flawed (editorial bias), serves as information quality control. Yes, tripe still gets published. Yes, good papers still get refused. But it works well enough.
However, again, as an academic myself, I am very much opposed to the insane prices to get at research, both as a researcher and a writer. I have found that, if your research budget can't handle getting at a key piece of research, an email to the person who did it oftentimes results in a Word file or a PDF, because what they want is for you to read and use their work as well.
All this really is is the same copyright/IP storm we see everywhere else. Producers and consumers want each others' lives to be easy and to be able to meet each others' needs. But there is a massive organization in the middle that maybe costs too much but which handles some of the important work necessary to avoid wasting people's time. It's fun to research, but no one really likes reading all the unfiltered crap, so those people--regular professors--on those editorial boards have to be paid.
I'm seeing Creative Commons licenses creeping in, slowly, though. I think we'll see big changes coming down the pipe in academic, peer-reviewed journals, same as anywhere else.
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
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
Aww, are you butt hurt that your brilliant crank works have been rejected time and time again? Surprise surprise.
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?
...
Ease of accessibility is orthogonal to the question of what the role of academic journals is in modern society. Journals perform one basic service: vetting. The more prestigious the journal, the more exacting the vetting (and, nominally, the converse is true). There are journals which accept well under 30% of submissions. It is entirely based on reputation, and the only way of developing reputation is to have a long, consistent history of certain behaviors. Journals, good ones at least, publish high-quality work.
In what field does the appearance of a printed article mean certain obsolescence? Certainly none of the ones I'm familiar with, consider publishing in, and read on a regular basis.
Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,
While the reviewing process can be slow in some cases, the mean time to publishing for most high-quality academic journals is (warning, purely subjective experience:) under a year. What journals are routinely taking over two years from initial submission to appearing in print? I'm not personally aware of any that take this long.
and the information is very difficult (or expensive) to obtain.
Difficult? In what way? If you have a subscription, journals go out of their way to make it easy to get copies of the articles. In fact, journals make it easy to access the abstracts so as to entice you to purchase the content. If you are an academician, you likely have an affiliation with an institution that would already have a subscription. If you work in industry, the cost of purchasing an article shouldn't be prohibitive. Google Scholar in addition to a wide variety of indexing services make it nearly trivial to find out about articles. With the new NIH mandate that any NIH-funded research must be publicly available after one year, nearly all biologically-related research will be free and easy. I smell a troll.
Does this hinder technological advancement?
I cannot imagine anyone would think that technological advancement (the fact that the OP does not say "scientific" advancement is perhaps a sign that the whole posting is a troll) has been held back appreciably over the last 50 years.
There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals?
Such as? I'm not familiar with any. Peer review and journal publication are symbiotic. Or did you think that the Slashdot model is peer review? It's definitely related (I've had discussions about Slashdot with editors of PLoS and Nature which, I suspect, influenced their earlier implementation of community review).
What do they offer our society?
This is a troll.
Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
No, as other responders have written, journals are gatekeepers to the permanent record of what is considered to be high-quality knowledge. You don't hear criticisms about accuracy levied at Nature and Science the way you do at Wikipedia, and while there are occasional retractions, the top journals are well-regarded because they are, in large part, careful. That said, one way of evaluating academic productivity is to measure publication rate. But then, one way of evaluating business productivity is to measure quarterly profit. Both are good, and both are incomplete unless you consider other factors as well.
On the whole, the questions posed in this posting are all somewhere between just naive and outright trolls.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
[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.
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.
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
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!
It's OK. He's got his own.
... 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.
One of the advantages that paper journals have over electronic distribution is in the permanence of the source... that's especially important in 'checking the working' when someone is going through the references. It's immensely frustrating to try and check up on an interesting (or unbelievable) assertion to find a URL provided as a reference. Chances are, by the time you check it the reference has been lost, moved, reshuffled, renamed, or simply taken offline. If the reference is to a source that isn't peer reviewed (which has been amply dealt with in this thread) or fixed in some way, you even run the risk that by the time someone checks your reference it's saying something completely different from what it said when *you* checked it.
A reference to an actual paper journal ensures the permanence of the record - it's a fixed point against which you can always reliably check. Books that are out of print are still available in libraries - papers from fifty years ago are still (moderately) easily accessible in their paper forms. In twenty years time, will I even be able to read any of the digital papers I have now?
I think the two different mediums work best in combination - I almost never check out a journal article in an actual paper copy, I get them from the online 'arm' of the publisher. In that way, you get the best of both worlds - a permanent record combined with convenient access.
You are young... Life has been kind to you. You will learn...
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.
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.
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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.