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Costly Journals Add Almost No Value Over Freely-Available Pre-Prints

posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 16 2018, @06:39AM   
from the editor-lives-matter dept.

canopic jug writes:

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)

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Original Submission

• What journals provideWhat journals provide (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @11:45AM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @11:45AM (#653520)

  There are several things journals traditionally provide:

  • They filter the incoming stuff. Some are better at it, some are less good at it, but all do it.
  • They provide permanent storage of the articles (traditionally, by printing many copies).
  • They provide authenticity of the articles (after they published it, you cannot alter it in any way, for better or worse; you can of course write an erratum, but you cannot deny that you wrote what you wrote, nor can you "unpublish" it).
  • They make it available (traditionally by selling those copies, mainly to libraries).
  • They provide a standardized way to find it and to refer to it.

  I guess it would be possible to separate some of those functions. We already have repositories like arXiv which provide some of those items (permanent storage, availability, some degree of authenticity, a minimal filter).

  One might think of a service that provides refereeing of arXiv submissions, and provides more authenticity by digitally signing those it accepted (so you see that this, and not another, version of the article is the one reviewed by this organization). Unlike journals, several organizations could review the same article, giving articles who have the stamp of several organizations a higher degree of credibility. The referee service signatures could be taken into account by general and specialized search engines to give articles with many signatures from respected referee agencies higher visibility. Those organizations would likely also have hand-curated indices of articles they refereed.

  There also might be paid services which provide pre-publication refereeing: The author can pay them for a refereeing process, so that at the time they publish the article, they already have the referee service signature applied, just as with today's journal articles when the authors choose not to put a preprint on arXiv before publication. The digital signature ensures that the authors cannot put up a different version and claim that were the one refereed.

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• Re:What journals provideRe:What journals provide (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 16 2018, @12:27PM (1 child)

  by Thexalon (636) on Friday March 16 2018, @12:27PM (#653535)

  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.

  --
  "Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin

  Parent

  • Re:What journals provide(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @01:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @01:18PM (#653572)

    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!")

    Parent