[apathy]

Sure, but a lot of those are tied up in the current single-blind extraordinarily-slow editorial-thumb-on-the-scales system that primarily benefits for-profit publishers.

Platforms like Authorea and Overleaf combined with preprint servers can help society journals compete with glamour journals without going broke. Essentially the society journal is destined to become an "overlay" journal where the editor suggests what preprints to look at while they're under review. This should, in principle, encourage actual review. Open review offers another type of incentive. Of course the actual society journal editors can be dinosaurs (and I say this after speaking directly with some of them), but eventually most of them get with the program.

I don't know what to do about the glamour journal fetish. Many of my papers in non-glamour journals have dozens of citations, which I think is great, because the glam journal papers (which, granted, have thousands of cites) are mostly cited by people who barely read them. So perhaps you say, well obviously that means the glamour journals have higher impact. Maybe. But I look at similar papers to ours in similarly glamorous journals and they have, say, 2 citations. Or 34 citations. Or whatever, after fighting through review for months. Meanwhile I have preprints and software manuals with more citations than that. But those aren't "for credit" because... shit, I don't even know why not. It's just an administrative quirk. Or something.

STAP and #arseniclife and the recent "MS gene" paper in Neuron provide endless examples of the fallacy that "peer reviewed" is necessarily better ("peer review is boosting with three weak learners"). But maybe that isn't the point. As has been said previously, Deans may not know how to read but at least most of them can count. :-/

[JohnHammersley]

Thanks for mentioning Overleaf[1] - we started it to help solve a problem we were having collaborating on LaTeX documents with co-authors based in different timezones - it helped avoid the 'multiple copies of the same doc in multiple email threads' issue, amongst other things.

Since we've grown (now at half a million users worldwide), we're now also working to help solve and streamline the submission & publishing process, for many of the same reasons discussed in this article.

Feels like change is finally happening, which as a scientist myself is great to see!

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

[apathy]

Yes, Overleaf is awesome. I feel bad but I stopped paying for the Premium version with git-to-Dropbox syncing because the "stock" version is already so good. We put up a paper on biorXiv recently with Overleaf and two days later sent it off to a journal with minor reformatting. I only use Word for clinical collaborators these days, Overleaf is so, so good.

I still wish you'd support Markdown so that I could ditch Word completely. I hate that fucking program so much. I'd pay for Premium again just to use Markdown. :-)

[JohnHammersley]

Native markdown support is planned -- in the meantime you might like this tweet :)

https://twitter.com/overleaf/status/763395560682364928

and for something more light-hearted, here's a D&D template in LaTeX!

https://twitter.com/overleaf/status/763524947339800576

[apathy]

I saw the D&D template earlier. That was hysterical.

I had not seen the markdown Beamer proof-of-concept. Very cool. Overleaf is the single best thing that has ever happened to my collaborative authorship skills, partly because Google Docs doesn't have a decent equation editor ;-)

[jdleesmiller]

It's also worth noting that markdown in LaTeX is possible: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/using-markdown-in-la...