In the ongoing open access debate, which oldmedia publishers have been able to drag out for decades, oldmedia publishers have repeatedly made the assertion that articles in their very expensive journals are greatly improved during the publication process. Glyn Moody, writing at Techdirt, discusses the lack of value added by expensive, subscription-only journals over the original, freely-available pre-prints of the very same papers, thus negating the claims from the oldmedia publishers.
Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the publications of scholars applying for posts.
Scientific method requires that hypotheses be testable, and that means publishing anything necessary for a third party to reproduce an experiment. So some might even say that if your research ends up behind a paywall, then what you are doing is not even science in the formal sense of the concept.
Previously on SN :
New York Times Opinion Piece on Open Access Publishing (2016)
India's Ministry of Science & Technology Join Open-Access Push
(2015)
Open Access Papers Read and Cited More (2014)
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 16 2018, @12:27PM (1 child)
Most importantly, what these journals provide is bragging rights for the people published in them. "I published 3 articles in Nature, so you should give me a tenure-track position or at the very least a raise." Since a substantial percentage of academic papers are never read after publication, that matters more than any of the contents of said papers. If your system doesn't provide the same kind of bragging rights, it won't be adopted. Period.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @01:18PM
I don't see why being approved by a high-reputation refereeing service shouldn't give the same bragging rights as being approved by a high-reputation journal. And the ability of having several independent approvals of the same article just increases the bragging opportunities ("my article was approved both by Nature and Science!")