THE FATE OF SCHOLARLY JOURNALS

it was long ago, maybe in the Sixties, that I realized there was such a thing as scholarly academia that produced print manuscripts put in "refereed" journals, to become sort of immortalized the way that court cases set precedent, which is why sets for shows about the law always show shelves and shelves of books all bound the same way.  The assumption is that wisdom comes in increments, each bit of thought building on the previous, always getting better and better.  We thought this was the way evolution worked, too, vertically and authoritatively.

"Researchers are still forced to write ‘papers’ for these journals, a communication format designed in the 17th century. Now, in a world where the power of web-based social networks is revolutionising almost every other industry, researchers need to take back control."

This is the url for the article that prompted this thinking.  https://aeon.co/ideas/scholarly-publishing-is-broken-heres-how-to-fix-it?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a0c59b51d9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_07_08_12_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-a0c59b51d9-68600437

"The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

"Recently, Springer Nature, one of the largest academic publishers in the world, had to withdraw its European stock market floatation due to a lack of interest. This announcement came just days after Couperin, a French consortium, cancelled its subscriptions to Springer Nature journals, after Swedish and German universities cancelled their Elsevier subscriptions to no ill effect, besides replenished library budgets. At the same time, Elsevier has sued Sci-Hub, a website that provides free, easy access to 67 million research articles. All evidence of a broken system."

For ordinary people who are not academic maybe this line of thought affects them most in the interaction between medicine and insurance.  Insurance wants to force all treatment into neat categories with money assigned so they know what to pay out.  Because of bogus and inappropriate treatments, they also try to enforce what they call "best practices."  They even call up doctors and tell them what treatment is not authorized.  Or they just refuse to pay for what is not on their list.  But the people who make these decisions in an insurance office are not medically educated and certainly don't follow the latest developments.  Medicine is one of the fields deeply impacted by new knowledge and technology, so it is always a little ahead of a desk manager with a list.

Two other distortions come from journalists looking for exciting stories but have a tendency to get ahead of the research, and pharmacy companies who set incredible prices as well as producing self-serving advertising.  The government is always the last to figure it out.  Everyone hates regulation.

Beyond that, human beings are always struggling with unwarranted assumptions, deep prejudices, and social divisions over color or gender.  Analysis in journal stories has been a way to explore and resist such emotional forces.

"Imagine using version control to track the process of research in real time. Peer review becomes a community-governed process, where the quality of engagement becomes the hallmark of individual reputations. Governance structures can be mediated through community elections. Critically, all research outputs can be published and credited – videos, code, visualisations, text, data, things we haven’t even thought of yet. Best of all, a system of fully open communication and collaboration, with not an ‘impact factor’ (a paper’s average number of citations, used to rate journals) in sight."

Universities have always played a kind of semi-moral role, partly because their original development was under the wing of religion.  The struggle for authority -- who knows best and how and why -- has always been a matter of philosophy even after separating from theology.  The ingrained tendency to go to "the Book, the Bible" and to write print commentary centered on reason and then research, are artifacts from theology.  Today we have access to the thinker on video, either as a lecture or in conversation, even with rivals.

But universities, like insurance companies, have wanted to evaluate their faculties and have used the number of journal articles become a means of determining tenure.  This is a standard easily corrupted, esp. by the journals themselves who have jacked up the prices of being reviewed and of subscribing to the journals without any standards of quality of thought or relevance to the field.

Maybe I should close with a personal example.  When I wrote a book about Bob Scriver, sculptor, I sent it to a publisher, noted for concentrating on Western Art.  This was a book rather than a journal but the context was similar and this press required three separate evaluations from experts.  The experts were defined by their own scholarly work in the field and by their affiliation with organizations like museum and historical societies.  Believe it or not, there are highly controlling political divisions among this pool of people and it's possible to determine results of the process by choose specific experts.  This is an echo of the academic practice of the "thesis" which must be guided and judged by a panel of three.

The "experts" form a system through the country made of friendships, rivalries, regional matters, and convictions about what the West is and was, what Western art is, how much auction prices indicate quality, and other non-objective matters.  Employment, as in most fields, depend on this system. They were so self-serving that I withdrew the manuscript.  It ended up in Canada.

The linked article from Aeon was written by a paleontologist, Jon Tennant.  In his field new discoveries and new ways of looking at evidence change thought and revolutionize methods so quickly that the slow process of readers, editing, and publication are far too slow to catch up.  Sharing can be done quickly on the Internet at websites.  But the checks and balances of cyber-information are only just developing and the material is so emotional that stories travel almost instantaneously.  The empowerment of the autochthonous peoples has a near-religious passion.  The process of developing new systems is just beginning.