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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]
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.
Uninformed readers voting on something is to peer review what being beaten to death by apes is to getting a good massage.
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.
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.
Another junior academic here.
I feel like the original submitter question slightly confuses the issues of "paper vs. online", "pay access vs. open access" and "journal vs. something else." The fact is that the "paper vs. online" question is already nearly completely settled: journals have shifted aggressively over the last decade towards being online. Many of them still release paper versions--but nearly all academics access journals online nowadays. The business model has shifted from selling print subscriptions to libraries, to selling online subscriptions to institutions. Any decent journal nowadays is online, and searcheable both from the journal site and due to integration with other search services (e.g. Web of Science).
Journals are adapting, and online systems have helped them streamline their operations. "Two or more years" is no longer the norm. Good journals (with online submission) turn around papers in a few months. The paper is usually available online as soon as it has been accepted and typeset--so the publication is available to anyone interested long before the delayed dead-tree copy is shipped. Also, preprint servers (arXiv being the most famous) help academics get their results out quickly, while still publishing things in more official/traditional sources.
With respect to the "pay access vs. open access" question--this is a more difficult thing to change. Journals are very accustomed to their ability to charge for the spread of information. Many academics (myself included) consider this unfair (as they seem to do very little, relying on volunteer reviewers, and requiring authors to do quite a lot of editing and formatting themselves), and even detrimental to the free spread of information that is crucial to science. Despite the inertia of the entrenched players, things are changing. For instance, the Public Library of Science journals are all open-access, and are doing quite well at attracting high-profile science. The list of open access journals is growing all the time. The pressure has even induced many traditional journals to sponsor preprint servers (e.g. Nature Precedings), or to give authors the option of making their contribution open-access (usually through a page charge).
With respect to the "journal vs. something else" question... it's unclear why we should switch away from journals if they suit our needs. The current journal process (rigorous publication requirements, peer review, editorial oversight) is very important to modern science. It helps maintain the rigor and transparency, while reducing fraud and sub-standard work.
All of that to say that I'm a little confused by the initial submission. The situation is changing. Nearly everything is online. Open access is gaining traction. Modern journals bear little resemblance to the printed versions of a few decades ago... so the suggestion that they are "obsolete" somewhat misses the mark.
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.
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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