Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.
A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige?
But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more.
It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
> Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.
No they don't. Their editors do, not the entire organization, and really it's the selected (volunteer) peer reviewers who do.
> A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied.
Agreed.
> One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors?
That's why I think universities should be the founders. The top professors in a certain field can nominate a good editor, who will be paid full-time.
> There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige?
Prestige comes from being relevant and innovative. Also, who said this has to be a new journal? Why not convert an established on?
The majority (70% or so) of submissions are desk-rejected without even being sent for review, and the ability to do that well is something that's learned over time with extensive detailed knowledge of the particular field served by the journal. Note that there are more kinds of editors than just academic editors, too, even at places like PLOS & eLife.
> "A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied."
Establishing reputation is the central challenge for a lot of the internet. Sorting spam from mail, sorting useful search results from SEO, sorting legit programs from malware on app stores.
"Let's just have a small handful of people manually review everything" is not a terrible first approach! It is the naive solution, and will work if you don't have to scale. It even worked for search for a couple years.
And you might argue that it's ok for journals to keep doing that because they don't have to scale. They don't have to review, rate, and publish everything good. They can have a very, very tiny output and it's ok.
But there is some cost to rate limiting scientific output.
So I'm surprised there hasn't at least been a good competitor incorporating what we've learned from other domains. It wouldn't be the same, but at least trying to use some things like citation counts and reader behavior for an initial guess at what deserves review.
All the arguments that "we need a small group of professionals curating these" lose a little weight in a replication crisis.
If you really wanted to try this, you might want to go after low hanging fruit. Someone should make a nutritional science journal, using purely algorithmic data to score proposals. Not much to lose there.
A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied.
How does this follow? "Open" doesn't mean "anyone can publish", it means "anyone can read".
Funding for editors and webhosting should come from the universities themselves. Replace Elsevier with a nonprofit consortium funded directly by universities, and a lot of these problems just go away.
> One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors?
I've been a reviewer and editor for various IEEE and other engineering publications and have never been paid. Of course funding for editors is helpful, yet it may be like open source where some are willing to put in work for free.
> Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.
I generally agree with you here
> A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors?
But the editors in the majority of journals are already volunteers. They might get some minor amount of money for their work (we are typically talking maybe $100 a month max), but that's it. The only journals that have full time editors are the highest impact journals like nature and science, but it shows again and again that they are not really domain experts and are not necessarily acting in the interest of science. I actually have heard a nature editor say "our business is to sell journals, not to publish the best science".
>There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige?
Well if the big universities and funding agencies would push, this would happen quite fast.
> But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more.
> It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige?
But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more.
It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.