When academic journals first came into fashion, they were
primarily a way to disseminate research. Unless you attended a lecture, there
was no other way you could keep up to date with new findings in a field without
seeing a physical written copy. One would think that the invention of the
internet would revolutionise how this process happens but this has not been the
case. In fact, it is deeply weird how much academia sticks to pretending the
physical publication is still a thing. I have never seen a physical copy of any
of my publication let alone held one.
We are all still pretending that lots of people read physical
copies of journals. We even format papers designed to be read like they are
still physically printed objects. It is the equivalent of logging into the New York
Times website and there just being a bunch of pictures of the physical newspaper
itself.
We do not need journals to tell people about our research. All
we need is a website that we can upload papers to so people can search and
access them. If only there was a way to publish a PAPER we are currently WORKING
on? We really don’t have to waste time with font sizes or fiddle with how to
present references.* And if you want to have a physical copy of them then you
can cut down a tree and buy a printer yourself.
So if not dissemination, then journals must be of some other
value right? There are two main reasons which often come up when defending journals:
scientific rigour and quality. These both come from the process of peer review:
where you send your paper to the editor of a journal who then sends them out to
anonymous referees and they are rude to you.
In terms of scientific rigour, having a few people read your
article closely for mistakes is a good thing. But you know what is better than
a few people? Lots of people looking for mistakes. If I made a typo in this
blog, due to the magic of the internet, I can quite easily change the typo. I
can even post longer amendments and changes based on people's suggestions as
they read my piece. If someone disagrees with me so much, they can write their
own blog saying I am wrong.
Now some may argue that doing away with formal referees will
mean we do not have anonymity and so may be afraid to speak the truth (or at
least this is the view of wonk54 on twitter with an anime character as their
profile pic). Personally, I am not massively convinced that this improves the process
all much as it makes referees overly negative.
There is little incentive to referee for a journal other
than academic duty, at the best of times. If there is an incentive, it is to
signal to an editor that you have high quality standards. This, however, doesn’t
necessarily lead to the overall goal we should all be working toward:
increasing scientific knowledge.
The problem with the current approach is that a lot of the
time reports are read more like how the referee would do the paper, rather than
whether it is correct or not. Often reports don’t take into consideration
whether the effort to re-run a study, to get one more data set etc is worth the
marginal gain in improving the paper - they are not the ones having to do it
after all.
The part I find the most frustrating about journals is the
argument that we need to assign “quality”. In economics, we have 5 journals
that are deemed the top in the field for historical reasons. I think calls to
break up this oligopoly miss the point. We should be debating whether we need
journals at all?
I am not against assigning quality to publications, but “quality”
is not the same as saying the research isn’t publishable (don’t get me started
on “not a good fit of this journal”). What you mostly end up doing is pinging
about your research to journals in order to find one that would meet some quality
threshold which can take years! Why doesn’t the first editor you send it to
just say this if of X quality? Like having AER, and AER macro? Just say AER 1, 2,
3, 4. Or even the top X percent of AER submissions. Journals are not the only
way to signal quality and we do not have to stick to this format. I think the
film review site Rotten Tomatoes does a better and fairer job of assigning
quality than academic journals.
I am not going to suggest exactly what replace journals with
but alternatives already exist. For example, physics is already moving away
from the journal format with something like https://arxiv.org/.
Journals do not need to continue because we think this is how science has been
done forever (peer-review isn’t actually that old). I am not really aware of
any (peer-reviewed) evidence that journals are the best way to expand scientific
knowledge???
The main thing I am worried about is we have a Lord of the
Rings problem. We may all think that destroying journals is the best thing to
do. But once people start publishing in these journals and become editors of
these journals, they no longer want to lob them into the fiery pit of Mount Doom.
I am nowhere near good enough to be Frodo. But if people at
the top are willing to get rid of journals, you will definitely have “my axe”.