« John McCain fact of the day | Main | Markets in Everything: Adam Smith's House »
*Public Choice*, on the web
The journal that is, and for free. Really. Until April. Here. The pointer is from Henry Farrell, who notes that the January 2008 issue contains a symposium on blogging which he co-edited with Dan Drezner.
Here is a paper on the economics of open access publishing. Here is Daniel Akst on the same. For Cowen and Tabarrok on the same, well...you are here already.
Henry also asks what it would take to make researchers switch to a free access system. I don't envision the free access system as the status quo but free. Papers would be ranked directly in terms of status and popularity rather than ranked through the journals they are published in. Ultimately there wouldn't be journals and this would make a big difference as journals are the current carrier of selective incentives and status rewards. It would be easy to refuse to referee, since you wouldn't fear being shut out of publication of that journal; I suspect refereeing might die. And if status were attached to the individual paper rather than the journal, who would bother to become an editor? It would be a very different world and in some ways more like (academic) blogging than its proponents may wish to think.
In other words, the partial monopolization of for-fee journals makes it possible to produce status returns to motivate both editors and referees. Returning to the free setting, refereeing will survive insofar as writing detailed referee comments on other people's work helps with your own research; it is interesting to ponder in which fields this might hold.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 12, 2008 at 11:12 PM in Political Science | Permalink
Comments
Since both authors and readers want high-quality papers, reviewers may be redundant. If popularity and keywords could be combined to produce "virtual journals," then editors may be redundant. The leveling of power that voting (or digging -- digg.com) would give to all individuals would reduce the power of today's gatekeepers (reviewers and editors). And just like that -- bang bang bang -- the entire structure of what is "good" would fall apart. Can academics handle democratic opinion of what is good? Will the old guard be able to protect the status quo? The answer lies somewhere between wikipedia's revision wars/digg's herd mentality and today's glacial blockade on new/revolutionary/interesting ideas.
The good news is that nobody needs to decide where to go: Academics are already exploiting and attacking weaknesses in the current system.
Posted by: David Zetland at Mar 13, 2008 12:32:29 AM
Daniel J. Bernstein, noted cryptographer and mathemetician, has started publishing his own works and bypassing journals. He posts at http://cr.yp.to/
Posted by: Russell Nelson at Mar 13, 2008 12:34:45 AM
To a large extent, your predictions have come true in theoretical physics, a discipline in which nearly all papers have been available in an open preprint archive (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) for more than a decade. Status is confered by citation ranking, a metric on which candidates can be compared via a simple database query. The only journals that confer status are short-article journals that aim to report breakthroughs (e.g. Nature, Physical Review Letters). No one wants to be an editor and refereeing is often push off on graduate students. (But hasn't that last part been true for a long time?)
Posted by: David Wright at Mar 13, 2008 12:38:31 AM
Reviewers as a fairly radical replacement for journals and referees.
Posted by: Douglas Knight at Mar 13, 2008 12:42:04 AM
You could just use grad students as editors.
Posted by: kjhkjh at Mar 13, 2008 7:50:51 AM
Grad students will compete to see who can rip the most popular papers the most thoroughly, hoping to make a name for themselves if successful. at least, that's what happened in every seminar my grad program had.
The tough part will be finding a way to rank the criticism, not to rank the papers. the danger is that it will be like slashdot, where the jokes and in jokes and conventional-wisdom comments get moderated to the same highs as the one comment that accurately and completely shreds an article that deserves it.
Posted by: DK at Mar 13, 2008 7:56:00 AM
dk...you're right about the possibility of devolving into a flamefest...but as there's a higher cost for entry as a reviewer (i'm assuming..."jimmy69britney" won't be able to be a reviewer...or at least, not use his digg name), reviewer rankings would also be important, and as they'd follow you around, you can't just spout off tripe and expect to be reviewed highly as a reviewer.
Posted by: shawn at Mar 13, 2008 8:29:31 AM
And to think I was just getting used to being able to access pre-1997 PC on the web.
Springer should also lower the insane subscription rates for PC, or even better send it out to all members of the society. PC's status has fallen a great deal in the past 10 years, more people getting it in the mail would help things I think.
Of course I have made the argument that the JTP should cut a deal with the Public Choice Society to get that one in more mailboxes too.
As long I am prescribing things for institutions I have absolutely no control over, I think that the society should move the conference so it does not compete with the Midwest Political Science meeting for people.
Posted by: goodnessOfFit at Mar 13, 2008 9:29:39 AM
Russel: Dan also publishes results in conferences, at least, pretty regularly. And helps organize them, and is commonly on program committees.
Most recent papers in cryptography are findable on the net with a bit of Google and GoogleScholar, a dash of Citeseer, and a large dose of just looking up the authors on Google and finding their websites. We also have a heavily-used preprint server (eprint.iacr.org) which has a gazillion unvetted papers.
eprint servers and personal webpages do a great job of getting the research results to other academics in the field. I use both pretty regularly, but I'm in the field, and I can evaluate papers for myself, both directly (does this result really hold up?) and by reputation of researchers and institution. (Guys from KU Leuven, UCSD, or the Technion are pretty likely to be serious researchers, frex. You should take new results by Dan seriously, frex.
But this doesn't address two related issues:
a. How do outsiders decide which papers are BS and which ones are important? Journals and conferences do some of that work for you, but not all of it--a lot of frankly pretty pointless stuff gets published even at the best conferences.
b. How do employers evaluate the importance of your work? I work at an institution with a fair number of other cryptographers and a boss who understands my work pretty well, but the higher-level administration simply could never tell a first-rate research result from snake oil in my field, except by reference to some kind of measure of journal and conference quality.
It's not obvious how to solve these two problems, but it is pretty clear that they're not quite the same problem, though they're related.
Posted by: albatross at Mar 13, 2008 12:10:23 PM
As I remarked on CT, I fail to see the necessary connection between closed-access and rigorous peer review, nor betweeen closed access and desirability of placement. The amazing success of PLoS Medicine alone easily belies such notions.
Posted by: Daniel S. Goldberg at Mar 13, 2008 1:35:39 PM
--Grad students will compete to see who can rip the most popular papers the most thoroughly, hoping to make a name for themselves if successful. at least, that's what happened in every seminar my grad program had.
Really? They ripped famous tenured faculty who could some day in the near future be offering them a job in FRONT of that faculty? Not bloody likely. only amongst each other.
In many science fields, the grad students write the reviews for the profs who are refereeing. They do not say anything unpolitical, because everyone knows whose research it is and which groups would be the referees. No one wants to open themselves up for the negative criticism they own work would receive. This is the problem with supposedly rigorous peer review.
Posted by: mouse at Mar 13, 2008 1:50:05 PM
Tyler,
I think your point about "detailed comments" rather than refereeing is a good point that I have not thought about in relation to OA Publishing.
The reason that certain "primary literature" are considered so important in certain fields is because of the vast amount of "secondary literature" that respond to the initial journal article. For instance, one can fairly easily judge the importance of "Theory of International Politics" by Kenneth Waltz based solely on how many articles and books are written in response to it.
If blogs are at least some indication of academics' willingness to comment on other people's work in an "open access forum," it doesn't seem that there will be a shortage of those who are willing to spend some time assessing someone else's work.
Cheers!
Posted by: Josh Jones at Mar 13, 2008 1:56:30 PM
What a bizarre post. Care to explain how you come to your predictions/conclusions?
'It would be easy to refuse to referee, since you wouldn't fear being shut out of publication of that journal'
So you are saying that, as long as a scholar does not care about being shut out of publication of a journal, it is easy to refuse to peer review? Is this your policy as well for accepting or rejecting peer review assignments? You refuse to peer review for journals you do not see yourself submitting a manuscript to? If yes, would that journal preference be influenced by the prestige (say, the journal impact factor) of the journal?
Posted by: Wobbler at Mar 14, 2008 7:42:29 PM
Posted by: sfsdf at Mar 31, 2008 1:57:43 AM
