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Are Academic Journals Obsolete?
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jun 08, 2008 05:43 PM
from the all-the-cool-kids dept.
from the all-the-cool-kids dept.
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?"
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Easy question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy question (Score:4, Interesting)
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Data vs information (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Peer Review is Elitism (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:The One True Religion, All Over Again (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:Peer Review is Elitism (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Easy question (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Easy question (Score:5, Insightful)
I do think there is an important role for journals...it allows scientific themes and significant advances to be followed more easily. Somebody else (the editors) has screened a lot of submissions--looking for things like relevance to the journal, significance of data, a well-told story, etc--before it ever makes it to print, so the reader doesn't have to wade through a ton of crap to get to the interesting article he is looking for. The economics of journals will probably certainly change, but journals themselves will remain for the near future. And nothing stops a PI from publishing their findings online if it doesn't make it into a journal. It's just that fewer people are likely to see it that way.
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Re:Easy question (Score:5, Interesting)
The submitter doesn't seem to know as much about academia as he believes. What kind of scientific publication is "obsolete"? More importantly when does that change occur?
The purpose of restricting published work to that which has passed peer review is to ensure that results do not become obsolete. They must uphold the same quality standards that we expect from all scientific disciplines - not blog-style fads that have become popular and at some stage will cease to be popular. The body of the literature should contain timeless observations that have resulted from hard study. These do not become obsolete, even if they are superceded by better methods.
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Re:Easy question (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Easy question (Score:5, Informative)
I also don't agree that the vast majority are reviews, at least not in experimental science. A simple search on PubMed will tell you which articles are considered reviews and which present original research. Unless you do a very general search, articles typically outnumber reviews 10 to 1.
As in every politically driven community, there is corruption in academia. Big name scientific egos can have an undue influence over a field, but that doesn't happen very often. Most scientists are fairly collegial toward each other and respect each others work, even if they don't agree with it.
But, you are right, publish or perish is a problem, and it leads to things like blocking of competitors publication, bad grant reviews, and fabrication of data. I have, unfortunately, seen some great scientists get driven away by some sort of bs, like an insufficient number of publications. But I've also seen a lot of great scientists succeed in the system. Unfortunately, given the current economics of research, it's not a system that is going to change easily. And academia is the only place with problems. Cutthroat environments in industry can create the same sort of problems.
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Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Journals are peer reviewed, and getting a paper accepted to different journals is not the same. Meaning, that some have super mod points over others.
Also, keep in mind that the creation of the web was to more easily transfer scientific data to scientists, but I don't think its intent was to replace journal publications.
Another point, is that in academia, they have a saying "Publish or perish". I simply don't think that "throwing some crap on the web" is a drop in replacement. Like the parent said, any bozo can put something on the web, but its not the same as putting something in a scientific journal. Now, many of these journals are available over the web, and they often cost money, and that money is spent on the review process and overhead costs. These journals do not have advertising, they are about science. The web is about, I dunno, piracy, porn, and slashdot or something.
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So you resubmit to a specialized journal. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No, jobs are defined by publication record (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:No, jobs are defined by publication record (Score:5, Informative)
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 [arxiv.org] 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 [plos.org] journals are all open-access, and are doing quite well at attracting high-profile science. The list of open access journals [doaj.org] is growing all the time. The pressure has even induced many traditional journals to sponsor preprint servers (e.g. Nature Precedings [nature.com]), 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.
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Re:No, jobs are defined by publication record (Score:5, Insightful)
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Printed journals are obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Yes, and the alternative is called PLOS. (Score:5, Informative)
slanted question (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
New Journals are Online (Score:5, Informative)
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.
*High Prices* for Academic Journals are Obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Quality Control or Quantity Control? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Peer reviewerd journals vital to science (Score:5, Insightful)
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!)
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Re:Peer review! (Score:5, Funny)
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