Do we really need journals?

1665. Phil Trans R Soc. Volume 1 Issue 1.

Reading time: 6-8 minutes

The announcement by eLife to do away with formal accept/reject decisions has caused quite a stir. One of the major claims of the eLife announcement was:

“By relinquishing the traditional journal role of gatekeeper and focusing instead on producing public peer reviews and assessments, eLife is restoring control of publishing to authors, recovering the immense value that is lost when peer reviews are reduced to binary publishing decisions, and promoting the evaluation of scientists based on what, rather than where, they publish.”

I've underlined a couple key points in that statement. If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading my 5 minute take on the eLife announcement for full context. But I'll just dissect these two points here:

1. "eLife is restoring control of publishing to authors"

"Restoring" is a weird word isn't it? Since when have authors had control over publishing? I would argue that, even in the era before modern peer review (pre-1970ish) authors still didn't have control over where they published. In my last article, I made a point about how this is, in part, because experts need to be accountable to other experts (authors, reviewers, or editors). But even ignoring that, strictly from a marketing standpoint, there's no point in human history where an author could effectively disseminate their work - fiction, academic, or other - without the aid of a publishing house. Darwin didn't print, bind, and distribute all his own copies of "On the Origin of Species" any more than Harper Lee ran the printing press to produce every copy of "To Kill a Mockingbird." And neither of them saw to all the intricacies of marketing their work, distributing it, or filling orders.

"But we're in the internet age. We have social media for dissemination and we can even use LaTEX or rely on algorithms (e.g. bioRxiv web versions) to typeset our work." That's true. It's a fair point. But social media is only really effective if you start with a following. There are tons of stupid cat videos on the internet, but the ones you're most likely to see are coming from just a few famous channels. Don't forget survivor bias: for all the social media success stories out there, there are tens of thousands that completely failed. And the ones that succeeded are often propped up by shout-outs from existing prominent users. Take it from me, fun fact: I used to run a skateboarding trick tips YouTube channel back from 2007-2011: the early days of YouTube. I was even successful enough that my "How To Ollie" video came up before Tony Hawk's. But I was only successful because I produced videos that were half-decent at a time when YouTube was devoid of content. Were I to start my channel today, I'd be lucky to reach even a level of fame best described as "obscure."

So why do scientists think disseminating their work by social media is any different? Why do scientists think that they can start a Twitter, reddit, Facebook, post a link to their few hundred followers and "boom!" their work is out in the world! Sure, some preprints take off like wildfire. But that brings me to my second point...

In the world of social media, only the content providers with robust airframes see the light of day.

​ 2. "eLife is promoting the evaluation of scientists based on what, rather than where, they publish"

I realllllly don't think this is true. The only reason eLife can attempt this is because they have clout, and people care what eLife publishes; i.e. people care where work is published. Why? Why does it matter so much where work is published? Shouldn't it be about the content!? The reviews!?

Going back to preprints taking off like wildfire: why are only some preprints successful at getting disseminated to the larger community? The answer: those preprints were advertised by a prominent individual or group that drew attention to the work. Maybe that was the individual themselves, or maybe it was their more famous colleague. Maybe it was a news agency. Maybe it was... (gasp) a journal? Regardless, it's just social science: information flow concentrates through respected individuals/groups. In network analyses, these people/groups would be called highly connected nodes/hubs.

And we benefit from this immensely: say you're a small town author - ♪ livin' in South Detrauthor ♪ - and you've got a big idea you want to go ev-ree-where. How do you get that idea out? You don't have any famous friends... what can you do? This feels like a problem society must have solved... Surely there's some emergent solution to providing opportunity to people like you? Why yes dear reader, there is! You make it a business to hear them out. You build a system where anyone, regardless of reputation, can approach the business and get them to consider their work. Behold: the academic publisher is born.

But let's imagine a world where there isn't a de facto, readily-approached, systematic receiver of scientific articles. Where would you go to get the word out about your work? You tweet it into the void, but no one is picking it up. Would you personally contact a bunch of prominent figures in the field and say "Hey, will you retweet my preprint? I think it's really great." Even if that magically worked (big if), surely those individuals would want to actually READ your work and ASSESS it for quality before they offered their endorsement, even if they were your colleagues. And since such high-demand individuals would quickly become overwhelmed with requests to endorse others' works, they would have to make a choice: refuse your (and 50 other people's) request (behold: the desk-reject is born), or quit their day job and make their full-time job reading, assessing, and endorsing other people's work. Behold: the journal editor is born.

Not to mention that there's a ready solution for such hypothetical, high-demand, freelance journal editors to increase their work capacity: they can vet and hire others, with the same commitment to high quality and rigour they have, to join them. Then they can outsource their editing responsibilities to their colleagues and share the workload. Uh oh... that's beginning to sound like... no... it can't be...

Search your feelings. You know it to be true!

​Simply put: academic journals are an emergent property of information science

In the last year (Oct 28 2021 - Oct 28 2022) there have been 51,359 preprints uploaded to just bioRxiv and medRxiv. Stephen Heard wrote a good piece about this issue, using the phrase "firehose of information" (love it) to describe how many papers are coming out now. To quote:

"You see, if I’m expected to read a manuscript, and its reviews, and an author response, and then weigh all that to figure out whether the authors have heeded the reviewer comments and what I should believe, then I think much of the work that ought to be done by the writer has been downloaded onto me as a reader."

I'd go even further: I'd say much of the work that should've been done by both the authors and the editors has been downloaded onto me as the reader. What an inefficient, colossal waste of an expert reader's time: why would I ever want a system that asks each and every reader to assume the role of editor? To get rid of journals is to propose a system where we all lose an immense amount of productivity. Let's have some self-respect here. Impact and rigour isn't just about the opinion of the person submitting the work, it's about the editor vetting the sum total of the work - the reviews, and the author rebuttal - to judge if what's submitted really passes the smell test. In the end, it's about having the people we trust, the people we respect, do the editing. And any time something is about getting the very best to do work, it's really about making that work into a proper job. Journal structures and dedicated editors are emergent properties of information science.

It's about respect

We respect talented scientists, that's why we're excited when they share a paper they found interesting. Why don't we respect the concept of journals, collections of respected scientists, the same way? Let's respect the reader's time. Let's respect our time. Let's respect what it means to be a journal article: not only has the paper been reviewed, but an editor has ensured the reviewers did their job as well. And we have our own sense for the quality of work that that journal, and its editors, endorses. Let's acknowledge that we're all only human, and authors, reviewers, and editors screw up sometimes. But we promote editors to their roles because they are universally respected in their field. We trust them to best judge the author's work and the reviewer's assessment.

Cheers,
Mark