See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_anarchy - a system can get stuck in a terrible state where everyone's best move is to keep going. A much better equilibrium could be constructed (Price of Stability), but how do we get there?
This is very weird to me. It seems to me like a variant of the 'argument from authority' fallacy. Publications should be judged on their content, not on who owns the printing press.
I do not like the current system, but established, well curated journals do provide some benefits in academia hiring. They do damage, too, but to a different group. My 2c.
The data[0] suggests the exact opposite: the more prestigious the journal, the more bad science it attracts.
[0] http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/even-without-retractions-to...
You think stuff published in nature is better? I found the opposite, that Nature publishes papers with "sexy" results and poorly described methodology. Nature is one of the worst journals, I cringe when info I want is in a Nature article (although with supplements it is getting better).
Hiring committees look at both quantity of publications and citations to those publications. The problem is that quantity doesn't always indicate quality. Which is why journal prestige acts as a proxy measure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor [2] http://researchguides.uic.edu/if/impact
Page-rank is "transitive" in the sense that it not only counts citations, but also citations-of-citations, etc.
I wonder though if such a system can be easily gamed (see SEO), without damaging the reputation of offending authors.
Also, we should perhaps have the concept of "negative citations". For example, when the text contains "In this paper we show that the approach of [..] is incorrect."
Many researchers do not love the current system, but are mostly OK with it. They are not looking to topple it; if everyone is using a different option, they will switch, too, but they are not your passionaries to drive the change.
How can you know that?
Edit: I don't know why I get the downvotes. My question might be naive, but its serious. I think it is not self-evident why an unkown self-published journal couldn't give you that. Elsevier was also once unknown. For me it sounds like a logical fallacy, but I wanted to know your take on it. It's pretty cheap to just downvote me for asking.
Compare this to a publication in nature. There, by virtue of the name, you know the article is worth more. (Note that in practice, Nature apparently has quite a few sham publications)
Under self-published journals I understand a journal brought out by the researchers or research organisatons. I don't see why Germany's or even Europe's universities and research institutions couldn't publish a peer-reviewed and checked journal in collaboration, without a third entity, that can provide the quality of, say, nature.
You mean a university press or a society journal? That model worked extremely well for > 100 years, until in the 1990s the societies sold their journals to Wiley, Springer and Elsevier, and somewhere around that time Springer took a wrong turn. You'd really like to ask why the selloff happened when it did.
In recent years, journals that claim to have a peer review process but which actually offer dubious or no review or quality control have proliferated (some are even published by companies like Elsevier). Having no established reputation doesn't prove that a journal is bad, but having an established reputation is a heuristic shortcut for evaluating whether it is good (at least in the "no one was ever fired for buying IBM" sense). Hiring committees use this heuristic to save time when filtering candidates.
> I regret to say that in reviewing perhaps a hundred grants or job applications and trying to find the ten grants to fund or one person to employ, I do not read every paper in the bibliography and assess the research on the basis of my limited understanding. I just don’t have the time or expertise to read and judge all the papers.
[1] https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...
They are but it takes time to build that reputation. Also publishing houses with big pockets can hire good reviewers etc and get established quicker. If Nature churned out rubbish papers all the time people would stop trusting it but their hit rate is pretty high and retractions are issued for poor papers.
There are some open source websites that are trusted (e.g. https://arxiv.org/ and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) but they are archiving content from already trusted journals. Then there is the 1 Open Source journal I would trust* : http://journals.plos.org/plosone/
I hope that we can accelerate this open sourcing in the years to come.
* I'm coming from a Medical Physics background. There may be others I'm not aware of that are also worthwhile.
* the scientific journals I know do not pay their scientific editors ([1], this can differ for absolute top journals like Nature/Science);
* arXiv is a preprint server, not an archiving server [2];
* you call "open source" what is usually called "open access", I think.
[1]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/43574/how-much-...
2) I was aware of this also. I have seen some weird stuff on arXiv but it is normally trustworthy within the realms of Physics. I must admit my use of it was higher as an undergrad than a postgrad. Again I was probably being imprecise in my terminology but it is an archive of pre-prints.
3) 'Slip of the tongue'. I'll edit that in my original comment. Turns out you can't edit a comment after that long. I didn't know that but I think that is probably a good idea overall. I meant Open Access not Open Source.
I would consider myself pretty well informed as I was in academia until a move to industry a few years back and still work fairly closely with academics. That being said I am always happy to be corrected, I know people's opinions on this subject are a moving target and it is probably different at different hierarchies within academia. Thanks.
The people accepting and reviewing the papers are the sole source of any journal's value. I mean, people didn't stop listening to Lou Reed or Prince or Radiohead just because they switched labels. Nobody buys music because of the label.
So what's stopping a mass defection of a reputable journal's editorial staff to a new, open title? I'd expect this level of brand loyalty from mindless consumers buying material junk, but not from a scientific community supposedly dedicated to objectivity and quality.
Reviewers aren't related to the articles: you don't know who reviewed your paper, and in good practices reviewers won't know the author of the papers either. The point of trust is the journal: the journal has its impact, its reputation, built as good articles are published and cited. And the cycle goes on: good reviewers means good articles published (on the average), that attracts attention to the journal, that will be looked for new articles and will attract better reviewers, that will do better revision, that...
Want to break that? Begin to give credit to the reviewers, and it will be gamified too: people will have to pay to publish with good reviewers (and there will be impartiality?), or they will make a journal/company so that you take off the weight of the reviewers names and will put the impact factor on the journal... ops...
Lol. Citing arxiv is even worse than citing wikipedia, and some reviewers will reject arxiv citations all together. It's full of junk 'science' by crackpots. Not just 'hey look I ran this regression on a public dataset' bad, but all-out 'I was abducted by aliens, and I made up an equation to show that they took me to Pluto' bad. Maybe it differs by field, I don't know - but suggesting arxiv is 'trusted' the same way Nature is 'trusted' is inane.
From https://arxiv.org/help/general: "Disclaimer: Papers will be entered in the listings in order of receipt on an impartial basis and appearance of a paper is not intended in any way to convey tacit approval of its assumptions, methods, or conclusions by any agent (electronic, mechanical, or other)."
As I've said in another comment it was used much more frequently during my undergrad years than at postgrad. Within Maths and Physics it is generally trustworthy as they are pre-prints of papers to established journals.
Would I cite an arxiv reference in a paper for submission or thesis? 99% of the time, no. Useful for citing on the web though where your users may not have access to the final journal article behind a paywall.
Yes which is why ordinary individuals can't just start a journal. But governments and universities come with already-established reputation. If Cambridge University started their own open access biology journal (or whatever) and encouraged their scientists to contribute I don't think it would be hard to imagine it succeeding.
Have any universities actually tried?
They may have thought about it but has anyone actually tried it? I'm genuinely asking.
Edit: It seems they have and it worked. See mjn's answer below.
Maybe there could be a policy of only counting articles in open-access journals.
> It's also the primary reason why researchers don't boycott these journals: most of them are simply not in a position where they can afford to without seriously damaging their career prospects.
Then that's where the log-jam is.
Unfortunately it's not a policy, it's the easy option for those evaluating scientist, which is why they do it. Sometimes there's a policy to ignore the reputation (or actually, the flawed metric that's supposed to represent it called "Impact Factor"), but that's not widespread. Academics unfortunately have more to concern themselves with than spreading Open Access.
1. University-scope undergrad journals
2. University-scope grad journals
3. University-scope science journals
4. University-scope humanities journals
5. Regional-scope science journals
6. Regional-scope humanities journals
7. Nation-scope obscure science journals
8. Nation-scope obscure humanities journals
9. Nation-scope science journals.
10. Nation-scope humanities journals.
11. Nature.
You start with the people who haven't been educated to rationalize the racket, in journals that have the least amount of reputability in the first place. (Ignoring fake journals, journal mills, etc.) They are also more likely to understand the underlying technology and probably do a lot of the implementation work, too.
Same for grads.
Then you get the journals that only function within the scope of a single university-- i.e., they are used to publish and gain notoriety within the university but are of only limited value outside of it. Probably best to start with a high-fallutin' uni whose stature could be used to convinced them the publicity of being the first mover is reason enough for the risk.
Then regional journals, where again the notoriety is relatively low and personal relationships are leveraged more for notoriety/credibility. (For example, an anthropological journal that covers a small region.) Because these academic communities probably already can recite the names of all the current scholars in the field, moving the research content isn't as disruptive.
In each case the science journals should go first. Humanities have a natural envy of science's verifiability/falsifiability, so they'll quickly follow whatever the scientists do.
Edit: clarification
That's a no-loss situation.
You're also underestimating the independence of researches at a university. They're not employees in the usual sense. In fact, the best method to stop them from publishing at some journal Y would be for the administration to tell them to publish in Y.
[1] Resignation letter: http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html
I'm currently leaning towards finding a way to convince large numbers of boards to flip as the most viable path to proper open access.
A solution might be dual publishing, but I believe some of the bigger journals require some form of exclusivity.
[1] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how...
Although the university base is far smaller, so this will be interesting to observe.
The government is not allowed to compete in the free market, so they can't just make their own. Even subsidies or support for an independent open one could be sued against by Elsevier.