Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

[Simon Cozens <simon@example.com>]

On 20/03/2014 00:14, Raymond Wan wrote:
> Well, one "good" thing that publishers still do is quality control.

Funny that we're talking about this while the whole Riken thing is happening.

Anyway, being published by a major publisher guarantees precisely nothing 
about quality control, as this story (and other similar ones) demonstrate:

http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763

Yes, the publishers took the papers down - after their publication quality 
control was demonstrated to be ineffective and their editorial boards clearly 
hadn't read the papers at all.

The only reason editorial boards haven't moved to shoving all their accepted 
papers up onto a free Wordpress blog or similar is... well, Stephen mentions 
inertia, which is certainly true, but really, it's about prestige.

"Being published by Springer" is still worth academic kudos, no matter how 
many times it is proved that a gibberish-generating computer program can also 
get published by Springer. Nobody likes to be reminded that the emperor has no 
clothes, because that damages their prestige. So academics prefer to 
collaborate with the racket too.

On the other hand, a Real Astronomer friend mentioned the recent 
age-of-the-universe thing (BICEP2) in rather negative terms: they BICEP2 team 
put out a press release first, then afterwards an arxiv pre-print (for a 
journal "to be decided"). If journals didn't exist or if publication in a 
journal wasn't seen as the gold standard of truth, this would be a good "open 
source" way to do things - release early, release often (BICEP2 also provides 
the data files on their web site, which is a good step for reproducibility and 
something that PLOS is now insisting on) - but in the current universe, it 
smells like a way of generating buzz in advance and manipulating the 
submission process.

It may just be that good, thorough science and bazaar-mentality processes 
aren't (seen as) compatible.