Craigslist Killed the Newspaper, but Science Publishing Thrives (for All the Wrong Reasons) | Nucleus Ambiguous

"The wringers of hands in the scientific community have been busy lately fretting over the current state of affairs in science publishing. Since I’m not really a science historian, I can’t speak to the novelty of these concerns, whether they represent some kind of unprecedented crisis of confidence or simply navel-gazing declinism. But there is ample reason to believe that scientific communication is encountering some of the same structural shifts that have upended the publishing business in general, and print journalism in particular. We’ve all seen newspapers around the country close under pressure from novel forms of media, but those not among the twitterati-blogosophers might be surprised to hear that many scientists now consider the main avenues of science communication hopelessly broken.  Here’s why:  Scientific publishing is still largely modeled on assumptions and economics of the dead-tree publishing era. In those glory days, publishers provided editing, typesetting, printing, marketing and distribution services that were otherwise impractical for scientists to obtain on their own. These days, not so much. While most journals do continue to produce a few paper copies, the associated costs of producing those have dropped dramatically (of course, there are now other costs, like hosting websites and archiving materials).  You would think that competitive forces would then drive publishers to lower their prices, but you would be wrong. The prices that publishers charge (mainly to academic libraries) for their work has instead increased, along with the profits of those publishers. Of course, moralizing to for-profit companies about making a profit is pointless, so what are the factors that contribute to this lack of market-driven pricing?  One possibility is that the market isn’t fully competitive. In fact, as with publishing in general, the field has become dominated by a few very large publishers. So institutional libraries claim they lack the clout to negotiate against these oligopolies. Another contributing factor is a kind of prestige science culture that has evolved in universities. Scientific journals are rated by what is called an impact factor ... The other thing that is keeping worriers worrying about the current state of the scientific process is a quality control issue. Some highly publicized examples of scientific fraud, in addition to a more (not-so-)benign neglect of statistical best practices, have led scientists in some quarters to warn of a replication crisis, suggesting that most scientific findings might be just plain wrong. Aside from peer review, which is largely incapable of detecting deliberate fraud, replication of previous results in different labs is an essential element of maintaining the integrity of research. However, since replication studies aren’t sexy they tend not to be pursued or published, a problem that seems to be exacerbated by the relentless pursuit of the precious impact factor.