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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, someone has to. The alternative is having the authors pay, and that creates the wrong kind of incentives.
To clarify, the bad incentives would be that journal would publish lower quality papers to get additional revenue?
Physical Review D, the journal that publishes most papers in the field, negotiated a fee of US$1,900 per article “on the principle that we should maintain our revenue”, says Joe Serene, treasurer and publisher at the American Physical Society, which owns the journal. The "principle that we should maintain our revenue"? I like that principle. Which box do I check to have that apply to me as well? I don't understand wh…
arXiv.org really makes downloading papers a breeze. If only it were so easy in other discliplines. It's a lot easier than downloading articles from, say, ScienceDirect. The latter is, despite its name, a lot less "direct" than former. Just count the HTTP redirects and the number of domain names looked up. And many journals seem to have their own idiosyncracies vis-a-vis downloading. arXiv is by comparison beautifully simple and reliable. It has a nice consistency about it.
I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system? I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
"Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access." Great, so the Library still has to pay for it...
Well, someone has to. The alternative is having the authors pay, and that creates the wrong kind of incentives.
Contrary to what some readers have said in e-mails to me, or inferred from what I’ve written, I’m actually not at all opposed to peer review or peer-reviewed publications. But the important thing these days isn’t a medium for publishing—pretty much anyone with an Internet connection can get that for free—but the imprimatur of peer-review, which says, “This guy [or gal] knows what he’s talking about.” A more intellectually honest way to go about peer-review would be to have every academic have a blog / website. When he or she has an article ready to go, he should post it, send a link to an editor, and ask the editor to kick it out to a peer-reviewer. Their comments, whether anonymous or not, should be appended to the article. If it’s accepted, it gets a link and perhaps the full-text copied and put in the “journal’s” main page. If it doesn’t, readers can judge its merits or lack thereof for themselves.
The sciences arguably already have this, because important papers appear on arXiv.org before they’re officially “published.” But papers in the sciences appear to be less status-based and more content-based than papers in the humanities.
I think this change will happen in the humanities, very slowly, over time; it won’t be fast because there’s no reason for it to be fast, and the profession’s gatekeepers are entrenched and have zero incentive to change. If anything, they have a strong incentive to maintain the system, because doing that raises their own status and increases their own power within the profession.
Given how cheaply one can find or buy a website / blog these days, I'm not sure where all this money is going.
[1]https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-w...
Why, in this day and age, is there still publicly funded research that is not open access? Also I could rant for hours on the need to make your data available for any peer reviewed publication.
My professor argued that keeping even publicly funded research and data behind paywalls will keep at least some of the people who have no idea about the scientific method from doing dangerous nonsense with it. I don't share this opinion.
I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system? I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
We need journals because without them we'd have the Android App Store. I know that seems like a stretch but the challenge is that there are lots and lots of papers (publish-or-die is a mantra remember) and so quantity is assured, but quality is more nuanced. And more importantly quality of the work. So what a journal does is builds a reputation for filtering for only very high quality papers, and then other systems f…
Physical Review D, the journal that publishes most papers in the field, negotiated a fee of US$1,900 per article “on the principle that we should maintain our revenue”, says Joe Serene, treasurer and publisher at the American Physical Society, which owns the journal. The "principle that we should maintain our revenue"? I like that principle. Which box do I check to have that apply to me as well? I don't understand wh…
I think the problem is that salary/tenure/promotion is tied to hazy, individual, non-standard assessments of impact, of which the calculated "Impact Factor" of journals that people publish in is one factor. My boss (and Public Library of Science founder) has a blog post related to this, http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=911 . Essentially, hiring/tenure committees don't explicitly sit down and plug in the impact fac…
-- Penn State has a "middle of the road" law school
I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system? I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
Peer review is done for free by the community in any case, so this would not be a major problem. Most suggestions for a post-journal system I have seen so far are about setting up electronic journals with editorial boards that send out submissions for peer review as usual. Moving away from journals seems to be largerly an issue of missing consensus and inertia. Also, where you publish is important for hiring committe…
This is a great observation.