[lifeisstillgood]

Firstly I think the PeerJ guys are doing a great job (I interviewed their DevOps guy a while back, nice approach)

Secondly, the journals argue they provide editorial quality - and this is true. I doubt that nature will lose subscribers over this, its the minor journals that are in trouble.

But this is not the point - editorial quality is not what science publishing is about - scientific quality is the issue. Are the results repeatable and significant? Not is it a convincing read?

Every scientist wants to do good science, write papers that are works of convincing literary merit and get published in nature with a talking head on the ten o'clock news.

Only one of those should be publicaly funded, and free to read for everyone else in the world.

[danso]

> But this is not the point - editorial quality is not what science publishing is about - scientific quality is the issue. Are the results repeatable and significant? Not is it a convincing read?

This is true, and theoretically something that is quantifiable. Yet it isn't. Not just because of the possibility of faked data and results, but because even self-evident scientific worth is not always easily recognized, especially if it is hard to find in an obscure journal. No one wants to be the scientist who has great findings but gets ignored because the world is too busy to pay attention.

[pedrobeltrao]

Scientific publishers (as it stands) provide 3 services (publishing, filtering, accreditation) - these could be decoupled and that is what PLOS One, PeerJ and other folks working on "alternative" metrics of evaluation for scientific publishing are pushing for. If pusblishers really only did publishing we would be putting our papers in blogs. It is very very frustrating that it is taking so long to decouple those functions and to have true publishing systems that are as cheap as blog hosting with services on top that are open for competition.

[mjn]

The highest-profile ones also provide publicity, which I think will be the last of their advantages to go (if it ever does). Even if we moved fully to a world where decentralized metrics (e.g. citation-based metrics) were the sole evaluation criterion, it would still be beneficial to publish in venues like Science and Nature, because they bring your article to the attention of many people (including journalists, who further spread it), which results in many more citations than you would get for the same paper published elsewhere. That's one reason, besides the prestige of the CV line itself, that people covet those kinds of publications: they're great for boosting your metrics.