Let me remark on a few. First why have peer reviewed journals:
1. Credibility: These journals were created to ensure credible results by having them reviewed by peers. Namely the reader had some semblance of safety that what was presented was correct. However we know that often that is not the case. Fraud is as bad in professional journals as in many other outlets so that safety net is not really effective.
2. Dissemination: Having a professional journal published and available at a library meant that one could access it. Even some almost 50 years ago I did searches, handed in cards and in a week or so got copies of the articles. I rarely ever sat with the journal itself. Today of course it is rare if I even know where they are. I used to keep my old NEJM, but they are all on line and all I get to look at are the ads. Same with JAMA, Science etc. Where possible I use on line access.
3. Citation and Credit: In the academic world your rank is based often on how many times you have been cited. Go to Google Scholar, look at your publications, add up the citations, and that is a measure of your rank. But not so fast. Today almost 90% of the articles say in IEEE publications are many authored, and I mean many, a dozen is not uncommon. So who did the work. Fifty years ago they were single authors so we knew who did the work.
4. Critique: Journals allowed professionals to write comments and have them published thus serving as an ex post facto means of vetting the results. Today we have instant comments on line, albeit in some cases from unknown individuals whose remarks we have not value of.
Thus the reasons for having journals may be fast disappearing. There are a few recent articles in the Scientist regarding this issue. The first looks at open access papers, journals such as PLOS PLOS is an online fee to publish not fee to subscribe journal. No paper, peer reviewed and the author pays to publish, a nominal amount. This in many ways is the road to the future.
Second, the other issue is that Academies are making faculty research available on line. Again the Scientist states:
Academic publishers are currently up in arms
about the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)—a bill that has
the perfectly reasonable goal of making publicly funded research
available to the public that funded it. Tom Allen, president of the
American Association of Publishers, described it rather hysterically as “intellectual eminent domain, but without fair compensation.” Why are he and his colleagues so desperate to retain the current business model? By any objective standard, academic publishing is a very strange
business indeed. It became established at a time when all publishing was
on paper, when duplication and delivery were demanding problems, and
when publishers provided an important service to researchers. Now, as
the Internet is dramatically changing other forms of publishing,
academic journals seem stuck in the 1980s, with results both comical and
disastrous.
The extreme costs of journals may force many to seek PLOS type approaches. Moreover providing White Paper works in progress, rather than the full peer review process is also a trend which I have used. If people know you, they can judge, in addition they can understand the work in progress model and at the same time one establishes precedence.
Thus perhaps there will be a transition from the old form journal, through an on line journal and with an real time work in progress approach as well.
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