Hard News: Open or not?
28 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 2 Newer→ Last
-
Bart Janssen, in reply to
increasing analysis of impact factors
For those who don't know, impact factors are a way of comparing journals. Theoretically a higher impact factor journal will be read by more scientists and papers within that journal will be cited by more scientists.
Hence administrators like to see staff publish in high impact factor journals, since they are more prestigious.
BUT
It's been shown that the impact factor of the journal is not correlated with how many times a paper will be cited.
For an individual paper it is how many times it is cited that is recognition of how important that piece of science was - except sometimes a paper is cited because it "merely" describes a useful method. You could of course argue that methods are as important to science as anything.
So journal impact factors are a bit of a false ranking system. But still one we use. Worse impact factors vary dramatically between fields. So for plant biology IF of 4-6 is decent but in other fields it would be awful.
-
no idea how to evolve to cope with the needs of todays academics
This has been the topic of many a tea time discussion. The key word above is evolve.
Quite simply the current publishing system evolved over centuries. It's purpose was to disseminate scientific findings, observations, theories and discoveries as rapidly as possible and to as wide an audience as possible.
Yes the general public did indeed read the publications from the royal society in the tea houses.
Now if you ask any 13 year old how do you disseminate knowledge as widely and as rapidly as possible they will all give you the same answer ... use the internet. Blog it, tweet it, post it on your website. None of them will tell you to print hard copies and sell them to libraries!
So what we have is a system that evolved in a different technological environment. It still exists (in most but not all fields) because ... well mostly because of inertia. But there are some reasons why it still exists.
The journal publishers have large databases of peer reviewers and contact lists for editors and experts that can assess new work.
Many research institutes use publications as a method of assessing performance of staff. It's a crap method but lazy administrators and managers like using it because it can be crunched down to a number and converted into some kind of league table comparing staff. Where have we heard that before? And like all such league tables, it's crap because what is good in one field (one great book per career) might be crap in another field. But actually genuinely assessing performance is hard.
So what should science publication evolve into?
Here's one idea the Frontiers Journals.
In other fields eg physics most discoveries are on the internet being discussed and criticized on the web pages for each lab long before there is any "publication". The actual journal paper is more of a summary of all the input gone into a well discussed observation.
I really don't know what the final outcome will be, but my personal bet is that open access is a transition between what we have now and what will exist in the future.
My best guess is that given the power of search engines there is no reason why data needs to be aggregated at all. Each lab could publish their findings on their own website, colleagues/competitors could comment on the page and findings directly. Important discoveries will get more hits and more recognition.
-
And a couple more thoughts.
There are real costs to the peer review system. It takes time to organise editors and reviewers and hence money. It takes time to copy edit really well and hence money. Those are real costs. We need to figure out methods to pay such costs, it seems that the British funding agencies are willing to hold money aside for publication, which is given to publishing houses, perhaps that money might be better spent on administrators directly responsible for managing peer review networks.
I've never been paid to review a paper and I don't know anyone who has. So the peer review process really could be free from that perspective.
One argument in favour of retaining existing journals is that they gather information in one place. But they don't. Know scientist I know relies on a single journal. We all use search engines and intelligent agents to find relevant papers. those search engines find web sites and blog posts just as easily.
One argument is the journals set a "standard" that can be trusted. And you wouldn't be able to trust a random web site. I find it really hard not to laugh at such an argument, let me just say all journals have published garbage at some time.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.