Comment by ACCount37
6 hours ago
Publishing is how scientists get their street cred. Thus, the scientists themselves want to publish in big name journals to up their rep - hitting something like Nature is major coup. And then they can convert their standing in the big science gang to things like research grants, commercial projects, academic tenures, etc.
If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.
Arxiv is not p2p, is a preview of what will be published hopefully.
Then you had promising projects like Plos, but they sold themselves. They turned into a joke: open access and good IF, but high fees for the author, thus becoming a quick way to get a sub-par paper published "for the points" if your lab can pay the fee. Pay to win, using a gaming term. If you know you have a good paper, you publish on any other (closed) journal with similar IF but cheaper.
PLOS Biology and PLOS Computational Biology are pretty well-regarded (the others are outside of my field).
PLOS One does publish pretty much anything, but that was always meant to be the point: "here's some data, make of it what you will. "
It's "not p2p", it's just used like p2p. A lot of papers on arxiv nowadays are "preprints" that will only ever get "printed" on someone's office laser.
The authors who put them up there didn't even plan on publishing in a journal. They just throw their work out there - no peer review, no nothing. Post the link on Twitter and maybe someone in the field will see it and find it useful.
This is especially true in fast-moving and highly applied fields like ML - the fields that are less "big science gang" and more "high intensity corporate R&D warzone".
You're mixing metaphors. Academic prestige is like the complete opposite of "street cred".
It's also misses the point. People don't want "glam" papers for ego boosts and bragging rights. They want them to keep the current jobs and perhaps get better ones.
Any replacement system needs to somehow serve as a token for people who can't/won't actually read your papers.
What I dont understand is why cant we get free open journals with high curation standards that would eventually get to the reputation level of Nature.
Hosting pdfs + paying out reviewers could be covered by donations.
Donations hasn’t been a successful path for the wider internet, no reason to expect any difference here. Ads embedded in the images, or perhaps listen to a message from our sponsor while we prepare your PDF?
Donations likely won't work, but a combination of realistic publishing fees that do not enrich a publishing house plus government sponsorship (which would sort of happen implicitly when those fees are paid from grant money) likely would.
> paying out reviewers
Reviewers are not usually paid.