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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: 3, Interesting) by Lester on Friday March 16 2018, @12:45PM (2 children)
Yes, I know. I suppose that the protocol is: The journal receives a paper, reads it, decides after that first skim if it is worth and then sends to academics for a deeper verification.
I said: "But then there is the danger of endogamy". In the end it is read also by academics, so what's the difference. The third party in the middle makes the difference, a subtle but important psychological difference. If scholar sent the papers directly to other colleague it could degenerate in a Quid pro quo. This third party is a barrier against such endogamy.
Yes, I agree. Nevertheless , it is nice to read that OMICS International [omicsonline.org] is getting momentum. Hopefully we won't have to wait so much years.
(Score: 3, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Friday March 16 2018, @01:36PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMICS_Publishing_Group [wikipedia.org] is considered predatory. It's a complicated game. OTOneH there are traditional journals extorting money from academia. OTOH there are the open access journals with an incentive to accept (for money of course), polluting science, and also extorting academia.
Open access, done right, is difficult.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 16 2018, @01:50PM
Actually, NO. As I said in my post, the editor and editorial board are academics too. Typically, at a journal, the submission is processed by an editorial assistant, who is often -- though not always -- an academic too (frequently a grad student or someone near the start of career). The editorial assistant generally ONLY looks to see that the submission conforms to BASIC formatting guidelines, such as a page/word limit, requests that examples/images be provided in a separate file or separate part of the document, etc.
Then the editorial assistant will pass the article onto an editor (an academic). If the editor is familiar with the author of basic subject content and it looks promising, the editor will send it out to other academics for peer review. If the editor isn't familiar with the topic directly, the editor may send it to another member of the editorial board (also an academic) who has more specific subject area competence. The editorial board member may give it a skim before it goes out for peer review.
And again, it's typical that none of these academics are paid anything for what they do -- except editorial assistants. Sometimes academics who serve as main editors get a small honorarium or something, but the reason most do it is for the prestige in the field. This is not true for all journals: less reputable ones sometimes pay more academics, because academics are sometimes less willing to do work for less prestigious journals.
But the point is -- the non-academic staff at the journal generally do NOTHING in terms of quality-control for the research. They're only concerned with formatting, layout and design, copyediting, etc. in terms of quality. (And frequently these days a lot of that is outsourced to India or something even at top-tier journals. And that often leads to communication issues in the publication process.)
Sorry, but I'm not sure you have an informed perspective on academic publications and journal politics. Except at the top-tier journals in a given field, it's common for academic editors to send out articles for peer review by "favorable reviewers" if they think an article is worthwhile themselves. Although peer review is supposedly anonymous -- both for the author and the reviewer -- it's frequently easy to guess who someone is in a given subfield given the topic of the article or by the type of comments made by the reviewer. I personally know people who have held grudges against other people in their field whom they ASSUME were reviewers on a rejected article based on circumstantial evidence. Some emerging subdisciplines have a culture where they tend to review other papers in the subdiscipline a little more favorably, because everyone in the field wants more attention paid to their stuff, etc. Heck, even REDACTED citations in an article can sometimes be a clue as to who the author is.
I don't mean to portray this as though the whole system is "quid pro quo" -- because it certainly isn't. Most academics have a certain level of integrity and standards. But there's at least the theoretical potential for politics to play a role in the process at just about every stage, even the supposedly "anonymous" ones.
Point is -- whatever you imagine third-party journals are doing as adding a "gatekeeper" role by being a disinterested party... it probably isn't happening. Academics basically run the whole process. (Also, by the way, publishers who actually employ in-house editors to do things like make publication decisions on content or to set up book contracts with academics, etc. -- guess who those in-house editors generally are? Mostly drawn from academics in the field. Everyone knows who they wrote their dissertation with, what it was on, etc. After all, who else are publishers going to employ if they actually want someone to JUDGE CONTENT except a subject matter expert??)