Why traditional scientific journals are redundant
Was it really six years ago that I first blogged about the Academic Journal Racket which siphons off millions from hard-pressed research budgets into the coffers of profiteering publishing houses?
Change is coming much more slowly over the last few years than I had anticipated when I wrote that piece, but at least there are signs that other disciplines are finally cottoning on to the fact that the old-style model of learned journals is way past its sell-by date. This has been common knowledge in Physics and Astronomy for some time, as I’ve explained many times on this blog. But, although most wouldn’t like to admit it, academics are really a very conservative bunch.
Question: How many academics does it take to change a lightbulb?
Answer: Change!!???
Today I came across a link to a paper on the arXiv which I should have known about before; it’s as old as my first post on this subject. It’s called Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories, and it basically demonstrates that in High-Energy Physics there is a massive advantage in publishing papers in open repositories, specifically the arXiv.Here is the killer plot:
This contains fairly old data (up to 2009) but I strongly suspect the effect is even more marked than it was six years ago.
I’d take the argument further, in fact. I’d say that journals are completely unnecessary. I find all my research papers on the arXiv and most of my colleagues do the same. We don’t need journals yet we keep paying for them. The only thing that journals provide is peer review, but that is done free of charge by academics anyway. The profits of their labour go entirely to the publishers.
Fortunately, things will start to change in my own field of astrophysics – for which the picture is very similar to high-energy physics. All we need to do is to is dispense with the old model of a journal and replace it with a reliable and efficient reviewing system that interfaces with the arXiv. Then we’d have a genuinely useful thing. And it’s not as far off as you might think.
Watch this space.
In the Dark 
August 20, 2015 at 5:05 pm
Yes.
August 20, 2015 at 6:30 pm
I do.
August 20, 2015 at 5:13 pm
I don’t agree with your first comment. Most papers go to arXiv before, or at the same time as, submission to a journal.
I hope we will have a better refereeing standard than most journals, actually. There’s an awful lot of dross that gets through peer review these days.
August 20, 2015 at 5:14 pm
Incidentally, I hit my own ArXiv submission problem a few months ago. I wrote an article about the history of astronomy that was published last year. It seemed like a good idea to submit it to the Philosophy and History of Physics section of the ArXiv, but I found I did not have permission to do that – I’m only allowed to submit to astro-ph. I don’t know anyone else who has submitted to that category of the ArXiv, so can’t get endorsement.
It’s a bit odd.
It’s possible a small number of serious researchers encounter similar problems trying to submit modern research articles to the ArXiv, perhaps in some developing countries.
August 20, 2015 at 11:01 pm
Folks, as someone long outside the university system I would probably not be able to submit to the arXiv without at least some kind of introduction, but let’s keep perspective and support Peter’s laudable and very important aim of getting research out from under the great publishing ripoff.
August 21, 2015 at 9:43 am
Peter, I’m a fan of the arXiv, but I’m not sure what the plot demonstrates. If you’re a strong researcher doing good stuff, you may well be more likely to have the self-confidence to stick the material out on arXiv as well – but also vice-versa. Therefore, a plausible explanation of the plot is that papers that never get put on arXiv are just less good on average (with honourable exceptions, naturally).
As to arXiv quality staying high because most papers are also sent to journals, I disagree. arXiv quality would stay high even if journals evaporated, because most people don’t want to make idiots of themselves in public. Now that immediate arXiving is now the norm (I think – although does anyone have actual statistics on this?), you know that it’s only the arXiv version that gets read, so it needs to be good. For this reason, I take the same care with everything I post, irrespective of whether it will eventually get refereed. Sending to a journal is just a backup in case arXiv should disappear one day.
August 21, 2015 at 9:47 am
I aghree that there may be a selection effect, but it does demonstrate that, statistically, papers submitted to the arXiv do attract more citations. Whether that is because people who write good papers also stick them on the arXiv is not proven.
I agree with your last point too. Institutions would be much better off paying to ensure the arXiv keeps going than continuing to squander cash on journal subscriptions. Of course many of them are supporting arXiv already…
August 21, 2015 at 1:21 pm
Citations are a blunt tool for measuring visibility or impact and should be treated with caution. Journals have become reliant on arxiv for visibility: I am not surprised to see higher citation rates for papers on arxiv. Arxiv still relies on journals for its quality control. It may be on the way towards becoming a journal itself, but if so it needs to find new ways to deal with quality control. We support and pay for Arxiv, but to us it hasn’t replaced journals yet.
Longevity is an issue. If funding would stop, the Arxiv paper archive could evaporate. I hear that has already happened to one or more electronic journals, so it is not unique to Arxiv. But it does need solving.
August 21, 2015 at 1:58 pm
“Arxiv still relies on journals for its quality control”
Simply untrue. One can post papers on arXiv without any journal being involved.
August 21, 2015 at 2:06 pm
Yes, but in practice, an appreciable fraction of the papers posted on the ArXiv have been prepared for traditional journals, and many have already been accepted after refereeing. So the journal quality-control process already affects much material posted on the ArXiv.
August 21, 2015 at 2:42 pm
Judging whether an Arxiv paper is worth reading does involve, amongst others, where it will be published or has been submitted. Remove the journal information, and the judgement becomes more (even more) biassed by who the authors are and where they work. Yes, you can submit papers to Arxiv which will never see a journal (and one person does list papers as ‘accepted by astro-ph’). Would you read them?
Peer review widens participation by validating papers by unknowns, it prevents errors creeping in to the literature, and forces authors to consider viewpoints other than their own. Peer review may be imperfect, but it is a solution to a problem. Without journals, that problem will still need solving.
August 21, 2015 at 3:12 pm
Bryn, Albert: I disagree in several respects. I select papers for further scrutiny in my regular arXiv trawls purely based on title followed by an iteration based on abstract. I assume that most will go to a journal but never check this. It’s a mistake to focus on known authors since great young people are entering the literature all the time. Of course you miss good things in this first pass; the papers you pick up subsequently are the ones you see cited or that get mentioned in conferences. This is the ultimate form of peer review: good papers get noticed, but bad ones are ignored. This is much more powerful than one referee sending a personal view.
As for whether arXiv papers are improved by piggy-backing on journal peer review, the question is how often the refereed paper is strongly improved by refereeing. My impression is that 90% of papers are altered so little that you’d be hard-pressed to spot it. And perhaps this figure is biased low as not everyone uploads the final version of their paper. I presume this is because the differences are really tiny – and if this is not the case, then the authors concerned deserve all they get.
So broadly speaking, authors get it right on first posting. To repeat: I’m sure this is so because they want to avoid public ridicule, not because they’re worried about what a single referee might say. If the journals had all packed up 10 years ago, the contents of arXiv would still be pretty much as it is.
August 22, 2015 at 11:03 am
John, I think without the referee step we’d see a lot more inflated claims being made in arxiv-only papers (they’d risk becoming press release like). I’ve reviewed papers where I had to push them to put in the caveats, that they were willing to state in response to a Referee, but forgot to add to the paper.
So I do think that having journals/refereeing does provide some upward pressure on quality – but I guess there are a variety of approaches which would yield the same effect through some other less onerous/exploitative process.
Finally, I have a real worry about relying on a group like arxiv, where its not clear who is chosen as a moderator and why. Having some oversight from the IAU would seem essential if we really were going to become reliant on it as a sole method of archiving and communicating (rather than its current use as a bulletin board).
August 21, 2015 at 6:41 pm
Out of (mostly) idle interest, plus issues relating to the cost of maintenance, just how big is the arXiv currently in GBytes?
August 21, 2015 at 7:28 pm
I’m sure that’s true of the text, but the photos accompanying one million papers?
August 26, 2015 at 8:39 pm
“Otherwise, papers become moving targets, and authors can revise them to take criticism into account after the paper was “published”.”
They should be able to, to improve quality; the problem is about citing something that might have changed. Perhaps you should be allowed one change at one week, another at one month, and another at one year, each given different reference tags.