
Thoughts on Improving Academic Journals - frgtpsswrdlame
http://douglaslcampbell.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-to-cure-cancer-thoughts-on.html
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impendia
> Here's another idea, why I'm throwing them out: referees should be given an
> option to have a larger payoff with a short duration of a referee report --
> say, two weeks -- while also agreeing to pay if they don't finish a report
> within two months, with a fee increasing incrementally each month. And would
> need to provide their credit card information in advance.

I have to admire the author for having the courage to suggest an outlandish
idea.

Nevertheless, what this would result in, _in principle_ , is in crappy reports
sent just before the deadline.

In practice, if any journal asked me for my credit card information, I would
pointedly inform them that I would have nothing do with that journal ever
again. I'm an academic mathematician; maybe an economist would not be so
triggered so rapidly?

It seems like the real problem is that there are not enough "soft incentives"
for refereeing well. This is, in my opinion, a cultural problem. Journal
editors (i.e., the people who request referee reports) are generally among the
most respected people in their fields, and so in principle doing an unusually
good or bad refereeing job should lead to making an impression on said people.
Nevertheless, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to matter a lot.

There are plenty of people who do a good job of refereeing, but it is usually
out of a sense of duty to the profession, and unfortunately there don't seem
to be as many incentives as there could be to do it well.

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dbcooper
Three things I want in terms of format/content:

(i) A single download that includes the article and supplementary information.
Some journals are doing this now.

(ii) Articles in epub format - document reflow on my tablet!

(iii) A single download of an entire issue. Particularly desired for Nature
Biotechnology.

Some kind of advanced article annotation system with an easy way to add
citations + links to other sources would be great.

~~~
JadeNB
> (iii) A single download of an entire issue. Particularly desired for Nature
> Biotechnology.

Given how many journals (at least in math) specifically forbid you from doing
this even if you have access to individual articles, I think that it's no
accident that this functionality isn't available.

> Some kind of advanced article annotation system with an easy way to add
> citations + links to other sources would be great.

I also think that this is probably better kept external to the journals (in
which setting, I think things like it already exist, with Mendeley, Papers,
etc.—though I'm not very familiar with any of them, so perhaps they don't
suffice). I don't want to have to learn a _different_ advanced article
annotation system for each journal that I read. (I suppose we could dream of a
unified standard that all journals would obey.)

