Problems with Academic Publishing

The Problems with Academic Publishing

Academic publishing sometimes is a painful process for authors, reviewers and readers alike. Some parts of the system are good: explicit authorship, peer-review and the ability to archive are the main ones.

Peer Reviewing

Often, public peer-review increases quality; if the peer-review is poor than now the public will know this, which will reflect badly on the reviewer and the reviewee. In the end, this is likely to get reflected in the comments of the article — in the same way that you, for instance, have written this question.

Experience of blind peer-review both as reviewer and reviewee shows that it doesn’t introduce a huge amount of quality control anyway. The variance of scores that people give papers is pretty huge. And the helpfulness of reviews to the authoring process is similarly variable. My feeling is that this sort of quality control still reflects the limited page lengths of print journals. Quality should also be judged post-hoc, after publication.

How it works

Submission

Technically, this is very straight-forward; authors simply post their article, or if it has already been posted “unpublished”, they move it to published. At this time, the article will categorised as “under review”.

While technically simple, there is a major sociological change here; at the point that the article is submitted, it’s also published. It will be publicly visible, perma-linked and archived.

As an alternative, authors may wish to publish the post to their own blog. In this case, they post a short note, with the same title as their blog post, a link to it and, if they wish, a short summary.

Review Process

The review process, in most cases, is critically different from the normal process; it’s not blind. The authors know who the reviewers are, the reviewers know who the authors are, and everybody knows what the reviewers have said.

In most cases, we consider that the reviewers would be mostly found by the author, either from a defined list or freely. In some cases, editors might wish to add one reviewer of their own.

Once the reviewers have been selected, they also write their reviews as blogposts with a link at the top, through to the original article. The blog technology will ensure that this link to the article shows up as a comment.

If reviewers wish to publish the post to their own blog, the process is exactly the same, if their blog supports pingbacks. If not, trackbacks can also be used.

Once all the reviewers have posted their replies, the authors address any concerns, finally mailing the editors to tell them that the process is complete.

Editorial Process

The editorial process is much like normal, except with less paper work. Editors do not, in general, need to pick reviewers as this work is now done by the authors. The first interaction with a paper that the editor will generally have is after the reviewing has been completed, when they will be mailed by the authors. At this point, the editor reads the reviews, decides whether the paper is appropriate, and whether any points need addressing; these can be communicated via comments or the editor can blog the comments, using pingbacks in the same way as the reviews.

Once everything is complete, the editor simply re-categorises the to “reviewed”. Publication happened a long time ago, during submission. The readers now know, however, that the paper has been through a full peer review.