According to Lang (2010), we could ask the question whether hardcopy scholarly journals are near the end. I know, I know. This is kind of an elephant in the middle of a room.
Lang raises the question based on the following bullet points:
1. Forty-page Articles Are Dead.
2. Survey Articles Are Dead.
3. Journal Issues Are Dead.
4. Page Numbers Are Dead.
5. Copy Editing Is Dead.
6. Peer Reviewing Might Be Dying Too.
7. The Article as a Unit of Publication Is Dead.
Lang then concludes with a question and call to action.
A New Beginning for Scholarly Publishing?
“So let’s abandon all the 20th-century baggage of traditional journals, and move to a more rational model for scholarly publication, with no copy editors, no reviewers, no redundancy, and no unnecessary delays. A concrete step would be to give each ACL member a DOI for a unipaper, and then ask them to non-redundantly populate this with a sequence, or a tree, of numbered paragraphs that consolidate all their work on a topic. Then, to get things moving, the present journal could insist that some proportion of citations be to paragraphs within these unipapers, with hyperlinks embedded right there in the citations. What are we waiting for?”
Feel free to take issues with any of the above points.
My opinion? Lang has very good arguments. However, …. I would say that due to the changing times -read here smart phones, I-tablets, blogs, social networks, etc- many hardcopy scholarly journals are actually evolving while the weakers or unfit to changes are dying as a natural e-phenomenon observed in online ecosystems. This is not unique of scholarly journals. Actually the same is true for any piece of hardcopy journal, newspaper, magazine, newsletters.
With more retailers giving discounts and even freebies just for showing a tweet about their products or services at their store, who knows what will be the fate of flyers, coupons, etc.
Publishers that don’t adjust their business models to the changing times are deemed to become the next LPs, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, etc.
Lang, N. (2010) Are We Near the End of the Journal. Computational Linguistics Volume 36, Number 4. Retrieved from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_a_00019
Haha, my 94-page survey just got accepted! To an electronic journal though. So, the paperless point is valid.
However, I would disagree about peer-reviewing. It is not ideal, but you cannot just remove it and do not establish another tool for quality control.
Clearly, more and more papers will be published without any journals at all (e.g. on arxiv.org). As a nice complement to journals, but not replacement, IMHO.
Hi Leo:
Thank you for stopping by. Happy to see that you are taking advantage of open scholarly journals.
There is now a trend to diversification from journals willing to move forward. Some traditional journals are entering in strategic alliances with the open/electronic ones to rebroadcast content.
I have mixed feelings about peer review. I’m in favor of peer reviewing as long as there is no politics involved.
Being a reviewer myself I know that sometimes politics do play a role. I have first-hand evidence on how politics is played in academics circles.
To illustrate, few years ago I was part of a reviewing committee that approved some papers for a well recognized IR conference. The organizers rejected our ruling in favor of other papers that we as a committee rejected. It turns out organizers just wanted to hear what specific authors wanted to say. I exposed them, but they did nothing. Tell me if that is not politics at its bests.
I can give more examples of how politics plays a role in peer reviewings and the scholarly scenario in general.
Even when there is double-blind peer reviewing one can kind of have an idea within “a circle” who is publishing or reviewing.
No,
. I just wanted to point out that more and more journals are going paperless, which is a very good thing!
it is not exactly open. It is a fully-online peer-reviewed ACM journal
There is also a trend to publish in truly open journals, which is also very good! However, I believe, open journals are a complement, but not a replacement. Because on-line journal lack quality control. Of course, the best will eventually win (get more citations). Yet, how should a reader choose a decent article to read?
I also have mixed feeling about peer-reviewing. Perhaps, it should just get better. Double-blind or fully open (no anonymity). There should be more interaction and more responsibility on a side of a reviewer. E.g., if the reviewer said that this method was old, just check the literature, one should be able to say: excuse, could you give a reference? If not, then you are not qualified to make such a statement.
I cannot agree more on politics. Yet, I think it is ubiquitous. Not just in peer-reviewing.
I agree with that.