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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

> We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.

In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.

If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).

I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other value at all.

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I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.

For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.

I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.

> which is a problem for professionals

dont worry, leadership will find another metric to turn into a target, after the old metric has stopped working for a decade or two.

> I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.

Yes, in fact this is mainly what I meant with "quality badge". It's a badge mostly for instutitional bean-counting processes. Fellow scientists don't need it that much, typically we can separate the wheat from the chaff with a very quick skim.

Maybe it's time to do a Eurovision style thing for the quality badge. Everyone uploads to Arxiv. Every who's in the field votes on the worthiest papers (not allowed to vote for anyone you actually collaborated with).

Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.

In my field, journals subsist precisely as targets for a PhD. 3 journal publications and you can become a doc.

Yes exactly. Right now they are arbiters of quality but they shouldn't be, and the move towards Open Access is changing their role.

semanticscholar is a better one stop shop than arxiv

Semantic Scholar is for search, but you can't just go there and look at everything that has been uploaded today as you do in arXiv, right? I know many people who check arXiv every day (myself included) but not Semantic Scholar, although I guess this might be highly field-specific.

What follows is totally offtopic, but to be honest I don't check Semantic Scholar much because I have a grudge with it. Profiles just don't work for authors with accented characters in the name (such as myself), papers get dispersed between multiple automatically-generated profiles. The staff is very helpful and will manually merge profiles for me when asked, but then I publish a new paper and wham, instead of incorporating it into the merged profile the system creates a new one. This has been going on for 6 years (if not more) and still unfixed.

For all the criticism that Google Scholar gets, I highly prefer it because it gets that right. It's extremely annoying when tools give you extra work for committing the sin of not having an Anglo-Saxon name (this is much more common than unaffected people would expect) and just don't seem to care to fix it.

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