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?
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... ).
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.
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.
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.
