[rorytbyrne]

I disagree. We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality. I think these new incentives are exactly what we want:

1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.

2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.

3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

> We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.

In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.

If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).

I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other value at all.

[dajt]

I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.

For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.

I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

> I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.

Yes, in fact this is mainly what I meant with "quality badge". It's a badge mostly for instutitional bean-counting processes. Fellow scientists don't need it that much, typically we can separate the wheat from the chaff with a very quick skim.

[hnben]

> which is a problem for professionals

dont worry, leadership will find another metric to turn into a target, after the old metric has stopped working for a decade or two.

[ocschwar]

Maybe it's time to do a Eurovision style thing for the quality badge. Everyone uploads to Arxiv. Every who's in the field votes on the worthiest papers (not allowed to vote for anyone you actually collaborated with).

Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.

[dr_dshiv]

In my field, journals subsist precisely as targets for a PhD. 3 journal publications and you can become a doc.

[rorytbyrne]

Yes exactly. Right now they are arbiters of quality but they shouldn't be, and the move towards Open Access is changing their role.

[cmrx64]

semanticscholar is a better one stop shop than arxiv

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Semantic Scholar is for search, but you can't just go there and look at everything that has been uploaded today as you do in arXiv, right? I know many people who check arXiv every day (myself included) but not Semantic Scholar, although I guess this might be highly field-specific.

What follows is totally offtopic, but to be honest I don't check Semantic Scholar much because I have a grudge with it. Profiles just don't work for authors with accented characters in the name (such as myself), papers get dispersed between multiple automatically-generated profiles. The staff is very helpful and will manually merge profiles for me when asked, but then I publish a new paper and wham, instead of incorporating it into the merged profile the system creates a new one. This has been going on for 6 years (if not more) and still unfixed.

For all the criticism that Google Scholar gets, I highly prefer it because it gets that right. It's extremely annoying when tools give you extra work for committing the sin of not having an Anglo-Saxon name (this is much more common than unaffected people would expect) and just don't seem to care to fix it.

[RossBencina]

> journals should not be the arbiters of quality

It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see, the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at large.

[rorytbyrne]

Indeed, they are irrelevant. Right now they maintain an administrative monopoly over the peer review process, that makes them de-facto arbiters even if it's peers doing the work.

Journals should either become tech companies offering (and charging for) new and exciting ways to present scientific research, or simply stop existing.

[SoleilAbsolu]

I agree, and...

Completely off topic, but thanks for creating AudioMulch, I don't use it actively anymore but it totally revolutionized how I approach working with sound!

[beezle]

At the end of the day, I expect a journal that I pay for to be better than arXiv and that means quality control. Few people have the time to self-vet everything they read to the extent that it should be in absence of other eyes

[pessimizer]

> we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.

That's literally all I want them to do. I would love if they dwindled away to simply being monthly blog entries with magnet links to the articles, maybe with an introductory editorial.

We refuse to do this, because we have deeply integrated journals into a system of compensation for everyone involved. They're just magazines; "journal" is the beginning of the pomposity.

You could already publish a "fusion" journal where you link to the best articles in your field, and publish reviews of them - or even go back and forth with authors who want to be listed in your journal for a paper that they're about to publish. Outside of salaries, it would cost as much as a wordpress/patreon blog, or really, just a monthly twitter thread. The reason this doesn't happen is because it doesn't integrate with the academic financial system.

The only thing worthwhile about the journals is their brands, and the major ones in a lot of their fields (especially medicine) have ground their brands into dust through low quality. They continue through inertia: once anyone has ever made money doing something in the West, it will be preserved by any means necessary, because it's worth giving up part of that cash in order not to lose all of it. Scams are only ever defeated by bigger scams.

Nobody who is only important because they published in The Lancet will ever tolerate the devaluing of the idea of publishing in The Lancet, unless you give him a stipend for being involved in the next thing. Consequently, you're not going to be able to get a job from being published in Bob's Blog, no matter the quality of the peer review. Hence $1500 open access fees.

[patmorgan23]

If publishing the most papers is the goal why do we even need journals? We have blogs and preprint servers if Volume is your goal.

Journals should absolutely play a role in maintaining quality and curating what they publish.

[DistractionRect]

> If publishing the most papers is the goal why do we even need journals?

For discoverability. Someone's trivial finding may be someone else's key to a major breakthrough, but little good it does if it can't be easily found

[Al-Khwarizmi]

In my field, arXiv (free preprint server) is actually much more discoverable than journals. It tends to be on top of Google searchers, many people (myself include) check it out daily, and few people even check journals (why would you check dozens of different ones if everyone posts their work on arXiv?).

[teleforce]

> everyone posts their work on arXiv

Not everyone.

Do you know that you can get rejected by arXiv if they think your publication is not worthy of their publication.

It's an open access journal masquerading as pre-print server. There are other much more open pre-print server.

[morby]

This isn’t being realistic. The major benefit of these is peer review. You aren’t going to have enough people to peer review the work of a massively open and public publication system.

On top of that the chance of finding something as you suggest becomes that much more difficult. Smaller findings get published now in a more controlled scenario and get lost in the stream.

Major journals are a net positive for surfacing important science.

[notarobot123]

Yet "peer review" would absolutely scale if it were actually the review of peers (and not just an editorial board). A large number of publications where submissions are reviewed by previous and prospective authors would be much like how open source peer review works, though not without its own set of issues.

Discovery is a search problem and its pretty clear that we have the technical capacity to solve that problem if there is enough of a signal from wide-spread peer review.

Major journals become those that re-publish and report on the big debates and discoveries of the actually peer-reviewed journals and this would be the work of "journalists".

[_jsmh]

Peer-review can also occur from non-gatekeepers, from non-experts. You realize you posted this on a massively open and public publication system, right?

Non-experts sometimes bring perspectives that gatekeepers are blind to.

[epigramx]

Peer review success is not the rule of the owner of a company but the acceptance you get from peers.

[j_maffe]

I can tell you for a fact that points 2 and 3 usually do not hold simply because publishing fees are directly correlated with the "prestige" perception of the journal.

[zipy124]

These are all valid points. I think we agree we are just looking at different things, I argued if journals maintained their arbiter quality then the system is bad, but you rightly point out that this could finally grip this quality out of their hands, and so it could be good for science overall actually. I think these are fair points :)

[rorytbyrne]

Haha yes I jumped off in a very different direction. The points you raised are very much valid in the short-term. But longer term, I think journals charging authors for some kind of enhanced research presentation service is actually quite valuable, so the short-term negative effects might lead to a good outcome for the industry down the line - we hope.

[newswasboring]

> we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.

At that point why even have a journal, let's just put everything as a Reddit post and be done with it. We will get comment abilities for free.

Maintaining quality standards is a good service, the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.

[rorytbyrne]

> At that point why even have a journal

Great question.

> the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.

I wish I could agree but Nature et al continually publish bad, attention-grabbing science, while holding back the good science because it threatens the research programmes that gave the editorial board successful careers.

"Isn't perfect" is a massive understatement.

[Teever]

So what service to the journals provide to the people who are paying them?

[rorytbyrne]

You pay them, they give your work a stamp of prestige that is mostly unrelated to the quality of your work.

[mmooss]

I definitely want journals to be arbiters of quality. I have very limited time and want to read the best, and at the same time I don't want to read misinformation or disinformation.

They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?

Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.

[heisenbit]

Maybe we should pay the ones that put in the work and leverage their experience to judge the quality which would be the reviewers. In this age of disintermediation journals add little value in providing infrastructure or paying (if at all) reviewers and that money is in any case mostly public money.

[rorytbyrne]

> Who else do you suggest and why are they better?

The arbiters are just our colleagues, at the end of the day. The journal is just the organisational mechanism, one of many possible mechanisms.

For example, I follow a weekly reading list (https://superlab.ca) published by a group of motor control labs at Western University. Those people are my arbiters of quality.

I want to continue having arbiters, and I want it to be the same people (broadly speaking). I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.

[mmooss]

That sounds fine, though I'd add the consideration that the further someone is from your field, the more that an arbiter and a highly filtered reading list become necessities. A scholar in another field isn't part of the daily conversation in yours and doesn't have time to get involved or read up on on it - and, without arbiters, they'd need to do in every field except their own. And the scientifically literate public has no hope - will they find the Western University list? For every field they're interested in? And read every list in every field?

A few central arbiters of the best research - e.g. Nature and Science - make science accessible outside your field, and outside professional science. Even reading those two publications is too much every week, with all the other reading, other activities, family, responsibilties, etc. on top of career.

> I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.

I don't care if it's journals, though people often assume that shifting power away from the current flawed institution to a new one will resolve the problems. The probems are inherent to power itself. We need a different structure with different incentives if we want a different outcome.

[_jsmh]

A different way to not require journals to be the arbiters of quality is to let the truth itself be the arbiter of quality instead of designate gatekeepers.

1. Open peer-review to anyone interested instead of only select few. HN is an example of this phenomenon but not for novelty specifically.

2. Permit publication of papers that are shorter for results to spread faster. AI papers are a good example of this phenomenon.