[Aelius]

This comment is more directed at hn commenters than the article itself. I'm led to believe that free journals aren't successful precisely because they don't have standards. They don't have standards because they can't fund people to do basic vetting (this is not the same as peer review), or otherwise are eager to accept whatever comes their way- which are usually papers that have been rejected by the reputable journals.

Assuming there is no money driven agenda, even the reputable journals have the issue where much of the content doesn't get peer reviewed. The findings are far from concrete.

But money driven agendas definitely exist too, and without basic vetting a journal finds itself hosting bs lobbyist material with sloppy "science" finding favorable results for anti-GMO, alternative medicines, organic farming, anti-vaccine, etc. The problem also exists that these entities are effectively funding their own journals to buy "legitimacy"- and they certainly would pose a threat to any journal that doesn't have high vetting standards.

As of yet, free access journals aren't reputable or actually desirable because they don't have adequate quality control. Free access to information is a worthy and noble goal, but we can't render the information useless in the process.

[Teodolfo]

There are plenty of free, open access journals that are reputable.

JMLR http://www.jmlr.org/ is quite successful. There are some fields, such as machine learning, that are not dominated by for-profit journals. Why is this possible in some fields and not others? My answer would be that it is possible in all fields, but incumbency advantages can be very strong and coordination across academic volunteers can be more difficult when they are individually less secure.

[sweezyjeezy]

There are some good free/non-profit journals, I just don't think you hear about them so much. There's a really good one in Number Theory called Algebra and Number Theory that has been around for about 10 years now. It was started by first-rate mathematicians and their standards, and reject rate have always been really high.

[mrhappyunhappy]

What’s wrong with organic farming? It’s the only kind of produce I want to eat.

[NateEag]

Organic farming does not mean farming without weedkillers or pesticides. It means farming with weedkillers and pesticides that are largely unstudied, compared with known quantities like Monsanto's products (whose positive and negative effects are well documented and widely understood).

The 'organic' products may be better on balance, but we don't actually know that, because the body of knowledge isn't nearly as developed yet.

That's my layperson's understanding, anyway. I could be wrong.

[Aelius]

It's entirely marketing, there is no actual data supporting the claim that it's healthier for you. It succeeds by the "appeal to nature" fallacy, which causes a bunch of problems and gets decidedly anti-science in a few ways.

Using only "natural" pesticides because they are "healthier". This is unsubstantiated, again it's just an appeal to nature. It can become problematic because natural pesticides often aren't as effective, thus certain farms/crops require using an excessive amount- way more than they would if they used the more effective synthetic pesticides. The synthetic pesticides are of course accused of being unhealthy (because unnatural)- though this is generally untrue. Furthermore, even the natural pesticides cause pollution problems, and overusing them isn't good.

Because the organic lobby succeeds by the appeal to nature, they are also anti-gmo. Which is a big problem.

While there are entirely organic farms, a lot of organic products are really not even what they advertise themselves to be, as many organic farmers don't actually run organic farms: they run normal farms with a section of it that adheres to organic standards. These standards are pretty arbitrary, except for the fact that organic farming is a significantly less efficient use of farmland, which is going to become a problem within the next century. We need to be making efficient use of our arable land, as we don't actually have much left on the planet unless we start turning national parks + protected areas into farmland.

Largely, organic farming is a faux luxury built on anti-scientific ideas that does nothing except waste valuable land resources, sold to relatively privileged people who are willing to pay a premium to feel better about what they eat.