Are Academic Journals Obsolete? 317
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?"
Re:Easy question (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Peer review! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Peer Review is Elitism (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Easy question (Score:1, Funny)
Rubbish! All we need is a moderation system, just like Slashdot's.
Oh, wait...
Um, no. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:Peer Review is Elitism (Score:3, Funny)
I'm sorry, these are supposed to be examples of the problem with peer review? It sounds like your problem is with our universe.
Re:Peer Review is Elitism (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Peer Review is Elitism (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, it is better to just use your gut feeling to find the truthiness of a statement. Instead of studying hard to understand elitist views about why curled up dimensions explains certain phenomena or why Shrodingers dead cat points to apparent paradoxes in modern physics, just think about it for a few seconds and determined what makes sense. And then fight like hell to promote your five seconds insight on the internet, like on slashdot.
More fun than reading elitist propaganda in reviewed scientific boring papers, and one don't need to worry about elitist bias like facts and data. Me, no worry!
Re:Quality Control or Quantity Control? (Score:3, Funny)
On behalf of X - Head of Engineering & Design - I would like to invite you to a celebration in honour of Professor Y, who recently celebrated the publication of his 500th academic paper.
500... seriously...