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?"
Easy question (Score:5, Informative)
Peer reviewerd journals vital to science (Score:2, Informative)
With all the kook and crackpots blogs around, of course it's vital to have peer reviewed journals. I don't have time to wade through hundreds of websites and then carry out my own verification of whether what I am reading is valid and whether they followed correct basic scientific experimental procedure. Are they basing what they think on hearsay, is it stuff that sounds obvious and intuiotive but totally wrong? A peer review process, while not perfect is essential to reducing the amopunt of noise out there.
Peer reviewed journals must stay in place, and are even more relevant today.
Re:Easy question (Score:4, Informative)
Peer review! (Score:3, Informative)
Peer review, peer review, peer review. It takes months or years for an article to be properly refereed and revised and revised again until it is properly ready for publication.
There already exists arxiv.org [arxiv.org] for many sciences, where people can publish results before they have been printed. However, many people that read their appropriate newsfeed will only read the articles on their that have already been published or accepted for publication. A lot of drivel gets posted on there since it is not required to be peer reviewed. Journals are a way of filtering for content that is notable and peer-reviewed.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Easy question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:slanted question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Easy question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:slanted question (Score:2, Informative)
But then I read a paper by Glenn Ellison in the Journal of Political Economy from 2002. His work suggested that not only is the mean time in publishing papers upwards of two years (especially in fields like econometrics), but that the submit-review-revise-publish cycle has been slower and going through more iterations over the past two decades, especially at the top journals.
I get the sense that there's very little in economics with any credibility in the field that has a cycle on par with Astrophysics Journal or Physical Review.
Re:Easy question (Score:4, Informative)
LaTeX is widely used in economics, probably more than word processors in general. It's easy to spot with working paper versions of papers; authors tend to leave the LaTeX default fonts and heading styles.
I've also noticed a significant trend away from PowerPoint towards Beamer [sourceforge.net] for presentations. From what I understand, in the physics world, PowerPoint still reigns for presentations (and even poster making!).
Re:Yes, and the alternative is called PLOS. (Score:2, Informative)
It still costs money to do Open Acess, at least as long as editors want to eat...
Re:Easy question (Score:3, Informative)
Submission of articles for most medical journals are for the most part online. There are attestations that have to be physically signed and mailed in, but everything else is online.
As for the actual peer review, that is also predominately online.
Re:Easy question (Score:3, Informative)
I do however have a recent document, not a journal article, that has the file name stamped at the bottom of each page. From the extension, I can tell that it was created in InDesign.
Text imported into InDesign can be in plain text format or, I believe -- it's been awhile since I've used InDesign, although I have done so in the past -- Word format.
So, in other words, people like my dad, who is the real live manifestation of your hypothetical researcher, are rare. I don't know if the time period in which one grew up would have any effect on the likelihood of being like him, but if it helps, he's in the 75-80 age range.
Re:Consider papers as a User Interface. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Peer Review is Elitism (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Easy question (Score:2, Informative)
Large international conferences are now sufficiently hard to get into that a fair quality is guaranteed (WWW conference last year had 10% acceptance right I think?).
I understand that this is quite different in other fields (physics, etc.) - where conferences have deadlines only shortly before the event and often only short papers/posters? Comp.Sci. has solved the need for a less formal venue for presenting quick ideas by doing workshops.
Bottom line: No - I don't thinnk journals are needed any longer, but then again, maybe I am just bitter because I have no journal publications
Re:*High Prices* for Academic Journals are Obsolet (Score:3, Informative)
It depends quite a bit on the publisher. For example, the prestigious Physical Review (A,B,C,...,Letters) cost quite a bit, but mainly because there are so many articles in there. If you convert it, an institutional subscription is only about $0.10 per page. An institutional subscription to Nature is much more expensive at about $0.90 per page. And Elsevier's Chemical Physics Letters (a fairly important journal in its field) is $2 per page! I think the publisher of Physical Review (American Physical Society) is a non-profit organisation, while for Elsevier, the journals are created with the sole purpose of extracting as much money from them as possible. Researchers in the field of chemical physics must have access to CPL, so the publisher can basically charge as much as they want.
Re:Peer Review is Elitism (Score:2, Informative)
Is it really that way? I would like to see the supporting data, like any peer reviewing a set of claims that is put forth in a publication would. That makes science concrete. You put forth a claim, and you support it with either strong theory and predictions on phenomena or with data, observations on the phenomena, and statistics.
"Most peer reviewed scientific papers are boring crap anyway."
That boring crap, my friend, is the supporting theory and observations. The aura of excellence surrounding the most laughable results is the strong scientific method. It is the same scientific method that eventually takes down the theories that become obsolete.
"Your worth should not be how many papers you've published but what have you done that is useful?"
And that is how a scientific research's value is measured really. The more your research is cited in other publications, the greater the value of your research is.
I agree that the peer rewiev process as we know it will become obsolete itself. But I don't see the world being our peer as the alternative. The next best thing may be the peer review process with human errors minimized. I'm not sure if involving more people would minimize the human errors.
Permanence (Score:3, Informative)
A reference to an actual paper journal ensures the permanence of the record - it's a fixed point against which you can always reliably check. Books that are out of print are still available in libraries - papers from fifty years ago are still (moderately) easily accessible in their paper forms. In twenty years time, will I even be able to read any of the digital papers I have now?
I think the two different mediums work best in combination - I almost never check out a journal article in an actual paper copy, I get them from the online 'arm' of the publisher. In that way, you get the best of both worlds - a permanent record combined with convenient access.
Because of the feedback loop (Score:3, Informative)
Before an article makes it into a journal, its content is usually published online as a report (either through the home institution or on arxiv), then at one or two conferences (where papers are reviewed too, but more quickly). By the time it gets reviewed for a journal, competent reviewers usually have heard of some of its content, which is good.
The journal paper however usually contains more data, more details, more discussion and better results than the previous incarnations. It has also been scrutinised and criticised a whole lot more. It has probably been revised completely at least once. This is a very different "product" than the initial report or conference stuff.
Nowadays the whole review process is online and often double-blind.
If a journal article has taken 2 years to be published it was probably because the authors didn't do a very good job of writing the first version of the article. The whole idea is to make the article's material into a reference.
Most researchers will then look up the article through web interfaces such as the IEEE's, the ACM's, the web of science, etc.
Scientists go through this trouble (they are both the authors, the reviewers and the editor -- not all at one of course) because it is worth it. No one has found a better system. After it is published, a good article will get cited often, and so the meritocratic aspect of science doesn't stop at publication.
In addition, the value of individual scientists is estimated through their paper output: the number of papers published, how often they are cited. Scientist have a strong incentive to publish quality new research, which is as it should be.
Eventually, if the stuff is good, it ends up as a book chapter, or even a whole book.
This is for image analysis and computer vision stuff BTW. It may vary significantly in other areas.
So no, journals are not obsolete. Since they are now easily indexed and searchable, they have become even more valuable and valued. What has changed is that institution have been able to bargain prices down, since paper issues are rarely used now and so the cost of running a journal has gone down. Journals that have an easy and relatively cheap subscription model have been able to get more mindshare, their "impact factor" have gone up, and their value as well. For instance, it is perfectly possible for an individual to subscribe to the IEEE and get some or most of its online library access at a reasonable price. This was unthinkable only a few years ago.