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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: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 16 2018, @02:25PM (2 children)
My experience is that peer reviewers and journals are also unduly swayed by trivial considerations, that they, like everyone else, use mental shortcuts to evaluate a submission. For instance, does the layout, format, and manner of presentation fit with tradition? Of course that has nothing to do with whether the finding is valid, but reviewers will be swayed by that one, in that any departure from such norms could indicate that the authors don't know what they're doing, perhaps are noobs, and so should be scrutinized more harshly.
Sometimes reviewers don't get it. They misunderstand a paper, and reject it when it should have been accepted. It is of course impossible to know how significant a work will be before it is published.
Another huge problem is their slowness and jealousy. They take months to review a paper, and mention, over and over, that it is naughty and unethical to submit a paper to more than one journal simultaneously. So a paper gets held hostage a very long time. If it is then rejected for bad reasons, the authors have lost a lot of precious time during which others could make the same discoveries.
One of the worst possibilities is the dishonest rejection so that a reviewer can take what is a good result, rework it some, and submit it elsewhere as their own work, thus stealing the paper. The pressure to Publish or Perish tempts professors into such things. One hears all the time about professors taking credit for the work of their grad students. So why steal only from grad students?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:08AM
> So why steal only from grad students?
Especially when there are post doctoral researchers are available. One post doc had done a great dissertation and stayed on doing post doctoral research for his advisor. He was doing phenomonal work for his former advisor and still getting many single-author research articles published in the prestigous journals for his field yet over and over again could not find a job. There was always massive interest whenever he first applied, which was always followed by silence and a brush-off. After some years of that he had some friends pretend to be potential employers. When they got to calling his former advisor for references, the former advisor badmouthed him severely in order to be able to keep him on doing work at slave wages. Once that was corrected, he found a good position at a top university within a few weeks and moved on.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Saturday March 17 2018, @12:28PM
That's an interesting (and valid) point.
There are some ways to mitigate this - e.g. by uploading a "preprint" to a preprint server such as arxiv.
In the fields of research in CS with which I'm somewhat acquainted, discoveries happen to quick for journals anyway. So the main publishing venues are conferences (workshops, symposia, whatever). These typically have a far faster turnaround time (a few months). Then, once published, an expanded version is sometimes submitted to a journal.
Of course, that's my experience for academics in well-off countries. In countries with far less science funding, they obviously cannot afford to travel to conferences too often. There, journal publications are far more important - even if the journals typically carry far, far less academic prestige than the conferences.