Note: I just discovered this article by Catherine Rudder, which addresses similar issues from a more informed perspective than mine.
With the internet, paper journals seem like a stranger and stranger idea. There is no longer any value in distribution, or economy. It's more convenient and more efficient to send millions of articles over the internet to millions of recipients than hundreds in paper form to thousands of recipients. More importantly, authors are forced to give up their copyrights to journals to give their ideas exposure. In doing this, they put the control of their words under a body whose priority is not dissemenation of information, but continuing survival. Yet, journals serve a very important function: reviewing research and marshalling credibility.
Nonetheless, I wonder if it is time for a change. Certainly, journals could operate in just the same way, but instead of selling bound journals, they would give the journal away freely on the internet. Perhaps google ads would cover the cost of distribution, but I doubt they'd provide any real revenue.
Of course, that leaves no money to pay editors, but I wonder: how do editors get paid today? I know popular magazines don't even cover distribution costs with their subscription costs. Journals cost more and have ads too--is that how they do it?
What if editors were unpaid? What if we something like an online Journal of Scholarship, which was moderated like an online forum, rather than edited. Surely the average quality of submissions would go down, but the easy exchange of information would counteract that to a degree. Today, it's difficult to find the information you need because such a small percentage of papers are indexed. Citeseer does a wonderful job, but it is quite limited in scope. And authors would retain their copyrights. The Journal of Scholarship would exist only to dissemenate information. Ideally an endowment would be created over time to completely remove concerns of survival.
And editors themselves are actually sometimes a barrier to progress. Radical ideas are often dismissed as oddball, and passed over for research that is progressive, but not driven. An open journal would remove that barrier and anarchize the spread of scholarly information.
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