> We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.

In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.

If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).

I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other value at all.

> journals should not be the arbiters of quality

It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see, the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at large.

If publishing the most papers is the goal why do we even need journals? We have blogs and preprint servers if Volume is your goal.

Journals should absolutely play a role in maintaining quality and curating what they publish.

I can tell you for a fact that points 2 and 3 usually do not hold simply because publishing fees are directly correlated with the "prestige" perception of the journal.

A different way to not require journals to be the arbiters of quality is to let the truth itself be the arbiter of quality instead of designate gatekeepers.

1. Open peer-review to anyone interested instead of only select few. HN is an example of this phenomenon but not for novelty specifically.

2. Permit publication of papers that are shorter for results to spread faster. AI papers are a good example of this phenomenon.

These are all valid points. I think we agree we are just looking at different things, I argued if journals maintained their arbiter quality then the system is bad, but you rightly point out that this could finally grip this quality out of their hands, and so it could be good for science overall actually. I think these are fair points :)

> we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.

At that point why even have a journal, let's just put everything as a Reddit post and be done with it. We will get comment abilities for free.

Maintaining quality standards is a good service, the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.

I definitely want journals to be arbiters of quality. I have very limited time and want to read the best, and at the same time I don't want to read misinformation or disinformation.

They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?

Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.

So what service to the journals provide to the people who are paying them?

Authors don't pay for that personally though. Nobody bats an eye at the $1500 publishing fee for a mediocre paper, that could have been a blog post, because the institution is happy to bolster its publication count.

Heck, nobody even bats an eye if that publication is to be presented at a conference with a few thousand bucks in travel costs.

> If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers

On the other hand predatory journals make a killing from APCs so there is some market for journals with no readers.

This would probably depend heavily on how tenure decisions handles publishing. If it is heavily biased towards quantity of publishing, then that won't matter as much as you can "pay to win your paycheck".

If the tenure process focuses on quality of work, then it should work better.

Many if not most of the readers are grad students. Arguably they're the people who pay that indirectly in increased tuition fees.

Yes you are correct, however I don't understand how this relates to my point, do you mind clarifying? I'd also caveat that the library (the purchaser of these bundles at most universities) often buys bundles based on requests from academics (more specifically research groups/departments) at the university, thus the readers do have some sway over which are purchased.

I built something like this but it didn't get users. Replying to an author for the valuable info they posted would pay the author and it also accepted public payments.

An AI or search engine that identified the value of a contribution and paid the author directly from advertising money based on query traffic could be a way to solve this.

You know, we briefly had this with the h-index, and now h-index manipulation is so rife that it is no longer highly correlated with successful academic careers

It is on acceptance almost universally. This is why more selective journals have higher APCs. The overhead of reviewing and processing more papers when less ultimately convert costs money.

Upon publication almost exclusively.

This is accurate and known to anyone actually in the area.

Small correction to your point: they perhaps provide a reason for peer review to happen, but it's scientists themselves who coordinate and provide the actual peer review.

That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.

Reputable quality bar isn't the right metric. Quality is a better metric. To the extent it can be estimated, impact is another. Neither of these require journals specifically.

A different way to look at this is to question what "old slop" actually means.

The reason not to publish in Nature is that it might take a long time to get everything right in the paper to publish, to the point it takes years to get it read. Publishing fewer results faster spreads the results faster.

I doubt that this is true except maybe for the top journals. Mid and low tier journals cater to scientists whose main incentive is to publish no matter how while moderately optimizing for impact factor (i.e. readers and citations). This lower quality market is huge. The fact that even top tier publishers have created low-ranking journals that address this market segment using APC-based open-access models shows the alignment between publisher and author interests will not necessarily lead to increasing quality, rather the opposite.

For academia's sake I hope you are correct, but my experience of the system leads me to suspect otherwise, though only time will tell.

One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.

Researchers are curating for the editors, and are often not even paid for it. So the value that the editors bring is often low at best.

For those looking for examples, see the clickspring youtube channel on the "Antikythera mechanism", he is a skilled watchmaker and he works with academics on actual reseach whilst building a replica, despite having no acadeic affiliation himself (at least that I know of, feel free to correct me if I am wrong).

But this is not related. You still have to pay the APC.

Surely you charge printing and mailing to the people you are mailing to though.

Thank you for contributing your expertise and experience.

> long-term preservation

How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files.

> Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation

I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?

> Typesetting is a big item

I'm calling bullshit. Look at how annoying the template requirements are for authors: https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions, and note the stuff around Word files. Other journals can be much worse.

If any serious typesetting were being done by these journals, simple plaintext, Markdown (or RMarkdown) or minimal basic LaTeX, with, admittedly, figures generated to spec, would be more than enough for typesetters to manage. In fact, if you were doing serious typesetting, you wouldn't want your users doing a bunch of formatting and layout themselves, and would demand more minimal representations of the content only. Instead you have these ridiculous templates. I am not convinced AT ALL.

Do authors submitting to literary agents have to follow such absurd rules? I think not. Can modern blogging tools create beautiful sites with simple Markdown and images? Yes. So why do academic publishers demand so much from authors? IMO because they are barely doing anything at all re: typesetting and formatting and the like.

Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.)

In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work.

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That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this.

I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for.

I'm not blaming you. By providing links, your citations go beyond what is required for academic papers.

Would it be rude to print the link "https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8" but actually link to https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8 when you click it? :-)

The DOI is key, then you can use a browser extension to do it, for example: https://github.com/natir/Redirector_doi_sci-hub

Better busness or are their customers demanding it? PLoS is a Non-Profit - feel free to look up how much they make. I believe it is public record.

If researchers cannot pay the APC then PLoS often reduces the fee. Also - half of that grant money is used by the Institution as administrative overhead. An part of that overhead is paying Elsevier for journal access. If you want to decrease the cost of research that may be a better place to start.

I agree that volume often tends to result in garbage but the review is supposed to lessen that. Again that garbage did get funded some how.

I am not pushing PLoS - they are simply a publisher I am familiar with that uses this model.

One last post.

The garbage thing is really interesting. I'm going to propose another reason for garbage is Academia's reliance on publication as the primary means for giving promotions and judging peoples work. This leads to all kinds of disfunction.

Was it Nobel Prize Winner Peter Higgs that said his University wanted to fire him because he didn't publish frequently enough?

That is true also. The pre-pub route may be your best bet if that is a concern. One shoe does not fit all feet. I am only trying to argue the merits of the Open Access model. It is certainly not perfect.

It is certainly not perfect. Competition/Choice is good. It is interesting that people do not understand their grant money is paying for it regardless. Either an upfront cost or through the administrative overhead the Institution gets from the grant.

non profit publisher or even better a goverment service.

Yeah was about to say the last textbook I paid for was $380 dollars and it was a custom edition where the author was also the professor.

The entire education system is a racket.

It is a kind of fuzzy signal though. Maybe a better replacement could be found. Like, if we all had PGP keys, we could just sign the article that we like, right? Then, a web-of-prestige that more accurately represents the field could be generated. ORCID could manage it, haha.

Prestige, in an honest system, would be a great signal. The problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal immediately gets gamed. Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the available options. A journal could still achieve prestige by curating and selecting the best available studies and research - in the proposed system, nothing is preventing them from licensing material like any other potential platform or individual.

Profit motivated exclusivity under private control resulted in the enshittification vortex of adtech doom we're currently all drowning in. If you want prestige - top ten status in Google search results - you need to play the game they invented. Same goes for all of academia.

People stopped optimizing for good websites and utility and craft and started optimizing for keywords and technicalities and glitches in the matrix that bumped their ranking.

People stopped optimizing for beneficial novel research and started optimizing for topical grants, politically useful subjects, p hacking, and outright making shit up as long as it was valuable to the customers (grant agencies and institutions seeking particular outcomes, etc.)

Google is trash, and scientific publication is a flaming dumpster fire of reproducibility failure, fraud, politically motivated weasel wording nonsense, and profit motivated selective studies on medical topics that benefit pharma and chemical companies and the like.

Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting publications.

It's incredibly cheap and easy to host for free. It benefits everyone the most and harms the public the least to do it like that, and if a prestigious platform tries to push narrative bending propaganda, it can be directly and easily contradicted using the same open and public mechanisms. And if it happens in the other direction, with solid, but politically or commercially inconvenient research saying something that isn't appreciated by those with wealth or power, that research can be openly reproduced and replicated, all out in the open.

"Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price" This is brilliant. So much information packed into one sentence.

No, they did not. They made it free to download, but open-access† licensing would permit third parties to legally mirror it on servers that don't block access from Algeria or Switzerland or privacy-focused browsers, and so far that licensing hadn't happened. I'm happy to see that apparently it's happening today.

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† As defined in the Berlin Declaration 22 years ago: https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration

Only up to 2000. It’s unclear if the catalog from 2000 to 2025 will be fully made open. There may be legal obstacles if the originating authors and institutions don’t consent.

I haven’t been able to find anything that states otherwise. What changes in January is the policy for new publications.