Opinion: Out With the Old | The Scientist Magazine®

"... During the transition to this new world of advanced access and online firsts, more and more scientists began blogging and participating in crowdsourced commentary. Today, many stakeholders agree that the publishing system ought to be replaced with a more efficient and transparent platform: one that benefits both authors and readers. But before we can improve upon the existing formula, we must assess its utility. Scholarly journals serve two major functions: curation and dissemination. Under the current framework, the curatorial function that journal editors and peer reviewers fulfill is considered problematic by many scientists: there is often tremendous disagreement among editors and reviewers about what constitutes a sufficiently “significant” advance to warrant publication in a specific journal1. Acceptance of a given manuscript largely reflects a value judgment of reviewers and editors about the impact that a paper may have on the relevant scientific field. The Internet helped democratize publishing. Scientists today can post a body of research and allow all interested readers to evaluate the work’s merit. This is why some scientists are now uploading pre-refereed work to servers like ArXiv and the life science-focused BioRxiv. Posting their work on public archives also ensures that anybody who wishes to access the work can read it for free. Post-publication review has traditionally been implemented in the—peer-reviewed and edited—pages of journals, but is now being done in newer fora (e.g. PubPeer).  In addition, post-publication review is replacing pre-publication review in some new open-access journals (e.g., F1000 Research and PeerJ). Furthermore, databases, search engines, and social media have essentially commandeered the curatorial function that journals are meant to fulfill. In the past, editors curated the content of a journal into a coherent body of work. Scientists now use Google Scholar, Web of Science, and other databases to identify articles of interest. They use Twitter and other social media to follow scientists doing work relevant to their own, and to engage in conversations about current issues in their field. Rather than reading journals from cover to cover, scientists today are reading exactly what’s relevant to them with the help of personalized, web-based tools. This brings us back to journals, and the role they play in the dissemination of information ... By combining preprints, transparent peer review (reviews received as well as reviews written about others’ work), post-publication peer review, and web analytics, hiring and promotion committees could glean a better idea of an investigator’s impact on her field; this holistic approach would yield more robust data than the number of Nature papers a researcher has, or the number of times her Cell work was cited ..."