Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

> The current system doesn't provide much value in terms of printing and distribution (even though some journals still do printing). The thing that keeps these journals alive is their reputation as filters for bad science. But even that is questionable, as proven by a lot of bad science making it into top journals.

Just because some bad science gets in doesn't mean it's 100% useless; perhaps the bad science we're seeing now is 1% of what we would otherwise?

I have no real insight in this, so I can't really judge how useful it is, but it's not an on/off switch, and as you've stated here it strikes me as a fallacious argument.

View on HN

I would argue that the publish or perish culture coupled with a creation of funding focused peer-review system in the 1970s has lead to much worse science.

There are plenty of cases where good researchers can't get published because peer reviewers either don't understand or misunderstand the work being done (even Geoffrey Hinton has complained about this).

Then on top of that we have vast amount of research that cannot be successfully reproduced, and this has been happening for decades. Largely because we have created a culture of 'rubber stamp' science.

The correct publishing paradigm has lead to blander and at the same time quite often garbage science.

You're not wrong. There was a legendary librarian named Jeffrey Beall who cataloged a whole little industry of predatory scientific publishing. Here's a quick article that mentions his work: https://publons.com/blog/bealls-list-gone-but-not-lost/

It'll be a long time before the traditional journals lose influence, but lots of the newer journals that arose were scams or ways for professors to publish what they wanted. It's a mess.

It's not common for researchers to find that no journal at all will accept their paper, so it's not like there's a bunch of bad science being done that we just never see.

The result of getting rid of the reputation system of prestige journals isn't obvious. It's possible that without the incentive to get into the most prestigious journal possible, many researches will lower the quality of their research. But I think it's more likely that without the hope of getting into a prestigious journal, researchers will try other tactics to coax others into reading and citing their work, and one such tactic is doing better research.

My main concern with abolishing journals is that the need for prestige in science wouldn't disappear overnight, and instead of trying to get into prestigious journals, to only way to get that prestige bonus will be to do the social climbing to associate yourself with prestigious researchers.

> But I think it's more likely that without the hope of getting into a prestigious journal, researchers will try other tactics to coax others into reading and citing their work, and one such tactic is doing better research.

Or clickbait and algorithm gaming. And social networks would be even more important. You already allude to getting associated with big names. It is already common to get one in the author list to get accepted in a “good” journal.

There are already too many papers being published on many subjects, so you tend to follow closely what comes out of a smaller community, and recommendations from the bibliography databases. Honestly, the problem is more with how research is evaluated by institutions and funding bodies than with the publishers, as greedy as they may be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com