
Academic publishing is archaic - fogus
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2010/06/10/academic-publishing-is-archaic/
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m0th87
The article is lacking in details but I think his point is true. Maybe the
solution isn't to evolve journals, but to replace them entirely. In the age of
the WWW, why is academic information still distributed behind walled gardens?

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jseliger
_In the age of the WWW, why is academic information still distributed behind
walled gardens?_

As a grad student in English, let me answer from my perspective: peer-review
and bullshit filters.

The first is important because it acts as a signal to other faculty members
and schools that you're at least producing something competent enough to have
convinced another person in your discipline to publish you. I can't judge,
say, an economist or historian's work particularly well because I don't have
enough background too. But if they've published a lot of peer reviewed
articles, I can at least say that others who can understand their field get
it.

(Note to those of you who are about to point out all the problems with peer
review: I agree. But the solution to the problems might be worse than the
problems.)

The second reason: if I'm writing an article or researching something, I don't
have time to wade through tons of bullshit. I want to get at stuff that I can
use. Peer review probably gets rid of some useful stuff and lets in plenty of
crap, but it's a useful rough pass.

Who coordinates peer review and publishing and getting referees and all the
rest of this scut work? Editors. They also get some of their journals' budgets
from publishers. Publishers are now monsters that control hundreds or
thousands of journals. They demand walled gardens and high payments. This
situation is unfair and dumb, but it is, and until you have a way to replace
the institutional authority and money of publishers, you get walled gardens.
This is a battle being (slowly!) fought (see Ars Technica for the latest
salvo: [http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/06/california-
libra...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/06/california-libraries-
gearing-up-for-fight-against-nature.ars) ).

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m0th87
Great points. But newspapers have value over op-eds and blogs because they are
peer-reviewed and bullshit filtered, yet the model is still dying. Granted
academia is somewhat different because so much more weight is put into
credibility.

But can't there be an alternative? I could see maybe a combination of
collaborative filtering with something like the PageRank algorithm applied to
the citation graph as an alternative to peer-review. It might not be quite as
effective, but it would certainly provide a lot of benefits. Particularly
decentralized authority and the distribution of academic work to the masses.

I'd imagine the issues are less technical, and more cultural; academics would
probably be hesitant to publish to a "journal" that substitutes peer review
with semi-automated processes for historic reasons.

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jseliger
The problem is that problems in academic publishing are well-known (I wrote
about them from the humanities viewpoint here:
<http://jseliger.com/2009/07/30/careers-and-careerism1> ), but the equilibrium
appears to be fairly stable -- even though everyone knows academic publishing
needs to change, no individual has a sufficient amount of power on their own
to change. So we get gridlock.

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mkramlich
from my perspective outside academia the main benefits I see to the
traditional academic publishing system is in crackpot filtering, terminology
standardization, and explicitly citing research dependencies and prior related
work.

