1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.
2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.
3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.
If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).
I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other value at all.
Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.
For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.
I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.
Yes, in fact this is mainly what I meant with "quality badge". It's a badge mostly for instutitional bean-counting processes. Fellow scientists don't need it that much, typically we can separate the wheat from the chaff with a very quick skim.
dont worry, leadership will find another metric to turn into a target, after the old metric has stopped working for a decade or two.
What follows is totally offtopic, but to be honest I don't check Semantic Scholar much because I have a grudge with it. Profiles just don't work for authors with accented characters in the name (such as myself), papers get dispersed between multiple automatically-generated profiles. The staff is very helpful and will manually merge profiles for me when asked, but then I publish a new paper and wham, instead of incorporating it into the merged profile the system creates a new one. This has been going on for 6 years (if not more) and still unfixed.
For all the criticism that Google Scholar gets, I highly prefer it because it gets that right. It's extremely annoying when tools give you extra work for committing the sin of not having an Anglo-Saxon name (this is much more common than unaffected people would expect) and just don't seem to care to fix it.
It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see, the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at large.
Journals should either become tech companies offering (and charging for) new and exciting ways to present scientific research, or simply stop existing.
Completely off topic, but thanks for creating AudioMulch, I don't use it actively anymore but it totally revolutionized how I approach working with sound!
Journals should absolutely play a role in maintaining quality and curating what they publish.
For discoverability. Someone's trivial finding may be someone else's key to a major breakthrough, but little good it does if it can't be easily found
Not everyone.
Do you know that you can get rejected by arXiv if they think your publication is not worthy of their publication.
It's an open access journal masquerading as pre-print server. There are other much more open pre-print server.
On top of that the chance of finding something as you suggest becomes that much more difficult. Smaller findings get published now in a more controlled scenario and get lost in the stream.
Major journals are a net positive for surfacing important science.
Discovery is a search problem and its pretty clear that we have the technical capacity to solve that problem if there is enough of a signal from wide-spread peer review.
Major journals become those that re-publish and report on the big debates and discoveries of the actually peer-reviewed journals and this would be the work of "journalists".
Non-experts sometimes bring perspectives that gatekeepers are blind to.
That's literally all I want them to do. I would love if they dwindled away to simply being monthly blog entries with magnet links to the articles, maybe with an introductory editorial.
We refuse to do this, because we have deeply integrated journals into a system of compensation for everyone involved. They're just magazines; "journal" is the beginning of the pomposity.
You could already publish a "fusion" journal where you link to the best articles in your field, and publish reviews of them - or even go back and forth with authors who want to be listed in your journal for a paper that they're about to publish. Outside of salaries, it would cost as much as a wordpress/patreon blog, or really, just a monthly twitter thread. The reason this doesn't happen is because it doesn't integrate with the academic financial system.
The only thing worthwhile about the journals is their brands, and the major ones in a lot of their fields (especially medicine) have ground their brands into dust through low quality. They continue through inertia: once anyone has ever made money doing something in the West, it will be preserved by any means necessary, because it's worth giving up part of that cash in order not to lose all of it. Scams are only ever defeated by bigger scams.
Nobody who is only important because they published in The Lancet will ever tolerate the devaluing of the idea of publishing in The Lancet, unless you give him a stipend for being involved in the next thing. Consequently, you're not going to be able to get a job from being published in Bob's Blog, no matter the quality of the peer review. Hence $1500 open access fees.
At that point why even have a journal, let's just put everything as a Reddit post and be done with it. We will get comment abilities for free.
Maintaining quality standards is a good service, the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.
Great question.
> the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.
I wish I could agree but Nature et al continually publish bad, attention-grabbing science, while holding back the good science because it threatens the research programmes that gave the editorial board successful careers.
"Isn't perfect" is a massive understatement.
They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?
Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.
The arbiters are just our colleagues, at the end of the day. The journal is just the organisational mechanism, one of many possible mechanisms.
For example, I follow a weekly reading list (https://superlab.ca) published by a group of motor control labs at Western University. Those people are my arbiters of quality.
I want to continue having arbiters, and I want it to be the same people (broadly speaking). I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.
A few central arbiters of the best research - e.g. Nature and Science - make science accessible outside your field, and outside professional science. Even reading those two publications is too much every week, with all the other reading, other activities, family, responsibilties, etc. on top of career.
> I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.
I don't care if it's journals, though people often assume that shifting power away from the current flawed institution to a new one will resolve the problems. The probems are inherent to power itself. We need a different structure with different incentives if we want a different outcome.
1. Open peer-review to anyone interested instead of only select few. HN is an example of this phenomenon but not for novelty specifically.
2. Permit publication of papers that are shorter for results to spread faster. AI papers are a good example of this phenomenon.
That's the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be those that focus on their readership.
On the other hand predatory journals make a killing from APCs so there is some market for journals with no readers.
Most kids unfortunately did end up paying to publish.
Heck, nobody even bats an eye if that publication is to be presented at a conference with a few thousand bucks in travel costs.
If the tenure process focuses on quality of work, then it should work better.
I am certain that that no system is perfect. My belief is that the Closed Access publishers have had free reign for so long that the largest ones abuse the system and competitive models are useful to restore some balance. The model also restricts access to information.
I would argue that one downside to Open Access is that incentives volume over quality (as others have said) but I would judge that on a per publisher basis just as I would any publisher. Closed Access models might also provide publication in areas of research that don't get tons of attention and research money.
I would also argue that there are other problems within research such as lack of reproducible results in many papers that is a far more pressing issue. Just my 2 cents. Thank you for the honest discussion.
Publishers have a finite capacity based on the number of credible peer reviewers. In the past, it felt very exploitative as an academic doing peer review for the economic benefit of publishing houses. I'd much rather have "public good" publishers with open access -- at least I feel like the "free" labor is aligned with the desired outcome.
Found,
> Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).
Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.
There's got to be ways to improve things though.
An AI or search engine that identified the value of a contribution and paid the author directly from advertising money based on query traffic could be a way to solve this.
> The only way we'll pay you ever again is through {the protocol}, deal with it.
If people just sought out and participated in better incentive alignment under the expectation that things would be better if only everybody did so... Well then things would already be better and we wouldn't be dreaming these dreams in the first place.
For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.
That top tier publishers create new low-tier journals for this market shows that they are very well aware of these incentives and risks. They are not flooding their top journals with low quality OA "pay to publish" articles, which was the argument from OP.
One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.
The service they are providing is peer review and applying a reputable quality bar to submissions.
Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish (non-revenue-accruing) publication?
That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.
A different way to look at this is to question what "old slop" actually means.
The reason not to publish in Nature is that it might take a long time to get everything right in the paper to publish, to the point it takes years to get it read. Publishing fewer results faster spreads the results faster.
Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.