Journals are used as a proxy for quality. A publication in "Science" or "Nature" is generally regarded as being better than a publication in, say, the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science".
Bibliographic metrics, like the number of publications and where they are published, are use as a proxy for the quality of someone's research. It can affect grant funding and career advancement.
Researchers can publish their own papers. But researchers also tend to want that work to be disseminated, both to spread knowledge and get recognition for the work. Journals help simplify that process. A field typically has one or two main journals, which most people in the field track. It's more likely that a publication will be noticed if it's published in one of those papers.
Haven't we solved the quality issue in other situations by giving users the ability to rate a scientific paper.
What's wrong with giving other researchers the ability to rate and comment on a paper.
It's a not a perfect filter but I would argue it works just as well a this journal reputation system and it prevents issues like people having to publish with them to get recognized not to mention it encourages discussion between academics which could lead to some breakthroughs as well.
You want peer recognition so why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications.
This system is a product of a bygone era and as all other systems like it it is resisting change by relying on copyright.
I see copyright as the root of most of our current societies issues it is just not compatible with how we work not to mention most of these papers were made with public funding so there shouldn’t be any copyright on it to begin with the copyright belongs to the public domain they payed for it.
A publication just publishing it on their website and slapping a price on it is pure theft and they should be treated like the pirates they are pursuing.
"by giving users the ability to rate a scientific paper."
LOL! No. Ratings are nearly useless. By which I mean I don't know how I would incorporate ratings into my own research.
How do you keep a ratings system from being a proxy for popularity, rather than a measure of novelty or utility? How do you keep it from being easily gamed? Does a "5.2" for a 1995 paper have the same meaning as a "5.2" for a 2010 paper?
"You want peer recognition so why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications"
Do tell me how. Post on my blog and hope people come across it?
Journals outsource marketing. Get rid of journals and something must replace that service, or I have to become a marketer.
"This system is a product of a bygone era .. relying on copyright"
You are mistaken. The system does not rely on copyright. The scientific publication system dates from the 1600s, dated from Oldenburg's 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'. Copyright dates from the 1700s, dated from the Statute of Anne.
The scientific publication system depends on reliable selection and curation. Its current form is dominated by large publishing companies which use copyright law for revenue generation, but that's only been true for the last few decades. Scientific publication also existed in the USSR even without copyright protection. (article 103(2) according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un... gave "permission to reproduce published scientific, artistic, or literary works as excerpts (or even entirely) in scientific, critical, or educational publications").
"most of these papers were made with public funding so there shouldn’t be any copyright on it to begin with the copyright belongs to the public domain they payed for it."
I understand and sympathize with your argument. But in practice things aren't so clear cut. Rarely does the money come 100% from public sources. Is your argument that even 1 cent of public funding means the entire work product must be in the public domain?
Are you making the moral argument that copyright should to the funding source? Or is it limited only to public funding sources? For example, if 100% of the money for a project comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, then do you want the foundation to control the copyright the work product? What if it's 80% Gates and 20% public funded? Is it public domain then?
If 3 years of research was publicly funded, and resulted in paper, and 2 more years was privately funded by BigCorp., to analyze the data further, then must that additional two years also be in the public domain?
And on and on. Unless "1 cent => public domain always", then there's no clear line. Is that your argument?
(BTW, there is another clear line - work by a US government employee is in the public domain. A small percentage of the scientific papers are in the public domain because of that.)
> How do you keep a ratings system from being a proxy for popularity, rather than a measure of novelty or utility? How do you keep it from being easily gamed?
To respond to this particular point, I'm not familiar with any characteristics of the academic journal system which prevent these problems either. Name recognition is often key to getting into competitive journals, which is just another way of calling it an easily gamed popularity contest.
Popularity plays a role. Here's a real life example: One of my quantum physics mentors submitted a paper to PRL (a high prestige physics journal) and it was rejected. Why? Because it came from a small, rather unknown university in Spain.
He was later admitted to Cambridge for a PhD and sent the exact same paper (same formatting, content, layout but different department/uni). It was immediately accepted. Does it necessarily mean that scientists in poorer countries are doing bad science? Or just that they didn't get their visa / couldn't leave their country / just want to stay there, etc.
The first filter most editors use is: "Do I know this research group? Are they part of the club? Have they published in top journals?". If not, it won't get read (unless it's a compelling and exciting title and abstract).
I haven't published there in a while but I don't think so.
> We are no longer able to accede to requests from authors that we withhold their identities from the referees. Such "double-blind" reviewing has been discontinued. [0]
Certainly the current system can be gamed, and is, and the complaints about problems with bibliometrics about 10 seconds after the first one was published.
But the argument is that "giving other researchers the ability to rate ... [would work] just as well as this journal reputation system".
My question is, simply, why should I believe this?
Bibliometrics often look at citations. Citations are, yes, a marker of popularity and social connections, but also have certain scholastic requirements. Editors and reviewers can and do point out missing references or highlight too many irrelevant self-citations. This is a type of moderation system. Imperfect certainly, but it does provide some grounding.
Also, it's not like the scientific publication system only contains original research papers. Review papers fill a curational role, with the advantage of a single voice (even if from co-authors) making the comparisons, so I at least have a relatively constant baseline.
I think a lot of ratings/reputation/moderation problems can be engineered around if you make all of the moderation metadata publicly available in a form that enables competition in the search functionality. Make articles, users, links, and comments up and down-votable in a way that is public and immutable forever, and de-couple the problem of mining the data.
Traditionally peer review is done anonymously from both sides. However, it is often possible to get a good idea of who the author is based on their related work, style and choice of references. This is particularly the case where the field is very specialised and there are only a few people qualified to judge papers.
This depends a lot on the field. Every neuro paper I have reviewed has the author's names and affiliations intact, along with unblinded citations like "Experiment was done as we described previously (SameFolks et al., 1999)."
On the other hand, I've always been suspicious that people can reliably guess the authors when doing a blinded review. I've seen one study that said 30% of reviewers (in a small sample) could do so, but that hardly seems like a reason to abandon the idea altogether.
> Unless "1 cent => public domain always", then there's no clear line. Is that your argument?
I don't see a problem with this. If you want public money, you have to put your work in the public domain. That's just a condition of getting the money.
The NIH does this. If you receive a single penny from an NIH grant, the work must be posted to PubMed.
Is it practical and desirable to have it both ways? Be published in a journal but also publish it on your own blog for free access?
So if you publish a paper titled "XYZ" in a journal and also put it on your blog, making sure your blog is visible to search engines - anyone searching for the paper's title "XYZ" will find it for free on your blog?
You're frequently not allowed to self-publish your manuscripts for free if they're submitted to a journal. The publishing agreement you sign precludes it
Many people do that. Google Scholar, among others, can help find them better than a title search on a general purpose web search engine. For the most part, your proposal represents the status quo.
Note that my comment concerned the proposal "why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications". Your proposal replaces "instead" with "in addition to".
A rating system would generally become an indicator of other academics' level of agreement with a paper, rather than an indication that it passed a quality and significance threshold. Citation ranking schemes already exist, but the citation counts are heavily influenced by academics being unable to NOT mention a dissenting view because it was recently published in a prominent journal. And I'm not sure examples like Amazon book ratings, HN karma or professionally-optimized PageRank can really be claimed with a straight face to be superior for curating quality content than good old fashioned peer review.
I do think open commenting systems would be a boon to academic discourse though.
Does pre-publication "peer review" not already function to some extent similarly as an indicator of level of agreement rather than a disinterested, objective quality and significance threshold? Everything I know of human processes suggests that it would.
I worry that a rating system would reduce the amount of thought each reviewer puts into their decision, but it's certainly true that peer review isn't perfect. Famously, the Fourier transform was not published for several years due to a disagreement with Lagrange.
> When Fourier submitted his paper in 1807, the committee (which included Lagrange, Laplace, Malus and Legendre, among others) concluded: ...the manner in which the author arrives at these equations is not exempt of difficulties and [...] his analysis to integrate them still leaves something to be desired on the score of generality and even rigour.
I will comment on it from my point of view (theoretical CS PhD student):
> What's wrong with giving other researchers the ability to rate and comment on a paper.
I do not see nothing inherently bad with this (provided very good moderation tools are in place). However...
* > I would argue it works just as well a this journal reputation system *
As a journal reputation system, possibly; although I find that experts have often very different taste compared to say general Hacker News public -- for instance, machine learning has a very high "coolness factor" these days compared to other areas of computer science, but it would be unwise to make a system where a weaker paper on machine learning gets vastly more credit than a better paper on say approximation algorithms.
However, an important part of the journal submission process is the fact that the editors ask the members of the academic community for spending several days on the paper, noting major and minor details and checking the validity of the proof.
Since the reviewers do their work for free, there is no reason why there cannot be an open system that replicates the same process; still, just "adding a comment system to arXiv" will probably not be enough, as people spend rarely that much time on comments (15 minutes tops, not entire days).
I think it's because no one can agree on a price, tax and international payments is too expensive, and there's a tit-for-tat understanding.
First, the price. The last paper I reviewed took me about 10 hours. I charge $200/hour. Should I charge $2000 for my time? If I'm paid by the hour, who tells me when to stop? If I'm paid a flat fee, how much is that fee?
I have seen a reviewer write something like "I read the paper twice. It seems good. Publish it." Does that get the same as someone who spends 10 hours for a detailed critique?
Second, does payment constitute work-for-hire? Does the publisher and/or reviewer need to pay taxes? Might some reviewers have a contract which prevents them from taking on part-time work? What if the reviewer is overseas? Do tax agencies from two different countries need to be involved?
Third, most people expect to publish, and get their papers reviewed. If a single author has three reviewers, then that author should expect to do about three reviews. This is an imperfect system which rewards publishing rather than reviewers, but there are also some compensations to the reviewer.
Moreover, I recall one story - I don't know the validity of it, but it has a ring of truth - where a daycare got annoyed with parents who picked up the children late. They decided to fine parents should that happen. As a result, children were picked up late more often because the fine was interpreted as a fee for extra daycare, and no longer social chastisement.
I suspect that reviewers are in a similar boat. I'll feel different about it if I get paid a pittance than if I were to do it for free, so long as others do the same for me in the future.
For free in the sense that the journals pay them nothing. So lets recap; the public/university pays for the researcher and the research, the public/university pays for the reviewing and submission process, and finally the public university pays to access the work they already paid to create and review. And people wonder why everyone but the journals think the journal process is broken.
Reviewers work for free for a few reasons reasons. First, it's prestigious to be a reviewer for a top journal and very beneficial for getting tenure. Second, it allows you to create connections with other top researchers. Third, it's giving back to the community by doing a service that needs to be done.
My thoughts exactly. I've never known a journal to do anything to promote the fact that someone has reviewed for them (eg produce a letter on request that states which articles someone has reviewed for them). It'd be a nice and free way of creating value to reviewers who generally work for free, but I don't know any journal who's ever done this.
It's hard to explain how important the journals are for a scientists. It's not even the effect that a paper in Nature is (in some disciplines) the fastest way to tenure. It's got an even bigger psychological factor: If you get into Science, you frame it and hang it on the most prominent wall in your living room or office. With a Nobel too rare to practically hope for, this system is the only reward all those mice-conditioning mice are conditioned to.
I'd like to point out that a journal is not purely a proxy or even an aggregator - I've gotten more detailed peer review with the bigger journals, because the reviewers are more critical and the editors more selective. I didn't start out as a fan of peer review, but now I say the more the better; it has markedly increased the quality of all of my papers which have undergone it.
I really like your counter argument, focusing on the process instead of the output. However I have to ask: isn't the end goal of submitting a manuscript to get recognition for it? Do you genuinely hope every time that your submission will be mercilessly torn apart and possibly rejected instead of getting the recognition for the work you've done?
Truly I have seen article reviews ruin a budding research scientist's career. Of course one could argue that other problems contribute to finding themselves in that position.
If there is something worth tearing apart, I would much rather it be torn apart than published. Recognition for my work is not what scientific articles are for, right? When I read a paper that has unaddressed problems, it's a waste of time - possibly years of my time if I base my own work on that weak foundation. I don't want to inflict that on anyone.
I would think that if peer review ruins a scientist's career, it would only be through a lack of support from the advisor. If the review is accurate the advisor should support the revisions, and if the review is totally mistaken the advisor should support resubmitting elsewhere.
I think reviews tend to be overly critical primarily because reviewers are forced to find excuses to reject 9/10 of the papers that landed on their desk, most of which they weren't even interested in reading.
I strongly believe that review could be almost exclusively through positive feedback, with crowd-sourced minimal annotations in the margins, i.e. "the idea in this paragraph came from <earlier paper link>", and "this idea is novel; wish I thought of it", and "there is a strong analogy between this paragraph and <some other tangentially related idea>"
It is not my experience that reviewers are overly critical. The notes I have seen fall into three categories: 1) pointing out the nagging issue that I knew but avoided, 2) misunderstandings, which are annoying but show how the paper is not clear enough, 3) genuine insights which I would not have seen. I have never wanted these to be more positive, but I can see the benefits such a cultural shift would have. Phrasing the notes as positive feedback would benefit the happiness of the authors, but make the notes lengthier and increase the effort for the (volunteer) reviewers. I wonder if the editor could reframe the reviewers' notes to improve the tone before sending them to the authors?
At least in chemistry where I work, a rejection rate of 9/10 at the review stage would be very unusual. It is possible that reviewers in the triage stage are harsher but I never see these reviews.
You confuse two things. The main career goal of a researcher in academia is generally moving up to the tenure track. The method to measure this progress is typically a)publication in journals with a high impact factor and b) Being on the technical review committee of said journals.
The reason researchers publish in these journals is it gives them street cred. There are several open access journals - but scanty participation since their impact factor is unknown and does little to promote the researchers career.
Speaking as someone who has published myself, the paywalls are highway robbery. But, imho - it is a problem only the researchers can solve by concertedly supporting open access journals and getting involved in them (maybe a yc research idea???). The established professors would need to take the lead on this - not the underlings.
Personally - I've seen the "light" and stayed back in industry as opposed to moving into academia as I had hoped. The rat race for funding & publications & street cred seemed a lot worse there.
Another important reason for slow adoption of open access is that most open access journals charge significant publication fees ($1000 or more.) Most academic labs run on shoestring budgets, so that's a lot of money. The principal investigator has to choose between standing on principle and publishing open access, or paying for equipment and reagents or sending students to conferences. That's not an easy choice to make, especially pre-tenure.
Agreed - that's a good point. In fact Elsevier has caught on to this as well. I remember when I published with them they gave me an option of making my paper open access if I paid somewhere around $1000 (or maybe it was $3000). I ignored that option. I agree there are costs - typesetting (well - I did send a LaTeX manuscript), etc. but not $1000 worth. If they'd said $100 - now I would have definitely considered the open access path.
Their re-typesetting your articles can just be pure grief, too.
For the last journal article I published, in a journal run by Springer, we submitted a nicely typeset LaTeX article using the template they provided.
Our best theory is that they then copy/pasted the result into Word. It came back to us as a "pre-print" PDF with tons of errors, font changes, etc. We had no good way to compare it to the original other than printing them both out and going through, line by line, looking for discrepancies. There were dozens and dozens of problems. And it was a 70 page article!
After sending them corrections we got to repeat this process 3 times.
I'm sure nobody would ever blame you if the original typeset paper were to suddenly land on Sci-Hub.
But seriously, what you're basically saying here is that in fact it would have been better to have published it yourself - except you may not have had the same audience who would have known about the paper?
Or did they also go through rounds of peer review and ask for clarification or find errors?
That's a bit harsh--many academic scientists can't do much to change the status quo. I would love to submit to open access journals, but I also really like eating, having a place to sleep, and other indulgences that having a job provides.
As a grad student, one basically doesn't have much say. Postdocs have a bit more latitude, but need to "play the game" to land jobs; pre-tenure faculty are in a very similar position if they want to keep theirs. Even tenured PIs are in a pretty precarious position: many are on soft-money positions (no grants, no salary), all of them need grants, and their trainees also presumably want to move up the grad student -> postdoc -> faculty ladder.
Getting this to change is a massive collective action problem and it's really going to need a push from institutions and the big names at the very top. This holds not just for publications, but a lot of other issues with academia too. I'd love to spend more time making our code solid and publicly available, but there's essentially no payoff for that either.
Even if they could (and they can publish their preprints), scientists rarely bother. That's because they want to communicate their science to people who matter to them (e.g. grant giving bodies), not to the general public.
Copyright, according to the US Constitution, exists for the public good:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
You may disagree with that conclusion, but there's 200+ years of belief that it's possible to be "for the public good" and be covered under copyright which restricts redistribution. The short term loss is outweighed by the long term gain, or so the belief holds.
Bear in mind that the copyright term back then was decades shorter than it is now.
That said, grant organizations are turning towards requiring publication either in an open access journal, or by having papers restricted for only a short time, rather than the full length of copyright.
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and even the Act before it (the Copyright Act of 1976) seems to rather violate the constitution then:
1. It doesn't promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
2. 120 years since creation or 95 years since publication for corporations, or the life of the author plus 70 years is not what I would call particularly "limited Times".
There may be 200+ years of belief in copyright, but things have significantly changed in the last several thirty years. Copyright doesn't make as much sense as it used to, and though openness and transparency has always been supported in theory (and in practice by a minority) movements that support Open Source over a range of disciplines far greater than just software are now quite significant. Whilst it predates the Internet in it's current form, the current web and other global distribution mechanisms powered by the Internet have radically changed a lot of people's views about freedom of expression and ideas.
Your objections were presented to the Supreme Court, who decided they were not actually un-Constitutional in Eldred v. Ashcroft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft . You won't be the first to disagree with a Supreme Court decision. But the only recourse you have is get the courts change their mind in the future, or amend the Constitution.
I have a hard time empathizing with an argument which, with the change of a few ephemeral names, Mad Libs style, could have been said at any time in the last 200 years.
The statement "thing have significantly changed in the last several thirty years" has been true for centuries. People in the the 1950s, or 1910s, or 1870s, could and likely did say the same thing.
Nor is your rhetoric about "openness and transparency" unique to these last two decades. Look to the populists and muckrakers from around 1900s as effective proponents of that. Look to the newspapers of the late 1800s, when the Linotype made it possible to have cheap newspapers, and look to the growth of wire services and the telephone, radio, and television, as recent examples of other technologies which have "radically changed a lot of people's views about freedom of expression and ideas."
I had no intention to argue against your character, nor upon rereading do I see myself doing that.
I do argue against the meaningfulness of your comments, given the judgement in Eldred, and given the last 250 years of incessant technological change. I also think you, like many, see the near history with a much better focus than the further past. But that is not a character flaw.
Well, I'm glad to see I was wrong :-) thank you. It's just you seemed to compare my, uh, rhetoric to what the "populists and muckrackers" of the 1900s were saying. Though in certain company I guess that could be considered high praise, I'm not sure I was too fond of the comparison...
My intent was to say that 100 years ago people would have said that the muckrakers and populists pushed for a level of "openness and transparency" which had never before been seen. I don't see how that is coupled to your character.
In the 1970s, after the Watergate hearings and the new FOIA and Sunshine laws, people again could have, and likely did, say that it was also a level of openness and transparency which had never before been seen.
Your essential argument seems to be "things are different now so throw out the old". But things always change, so that argument is always true, and can be therefore be used to justify anything.
I think it's a mistake to assume the general public must have access to the paper for it to advance the public good. A climate change paper does good even if the general public doesn't read it.
Furthermore, most of these papers are available to the public, just not online.
Many libraries have copies of the works.
I do think the pricing for non-institutional clients is absurd. Paying 30 bucks just to get past the abstract is nuts.
Nature, for example, permits private redistribution of accepted papers - I could send you a copy if you asked me for one - but requires exclusive publishing rights - I couldn't just put it on my website for anyone to take.
There is an expectation that each publication is a new piece of research and having the same work published in more than one journal and one conference is considered to be somewhat fraudulent. Just think of it: if researchers started to double publish, what would happen with the administrative "objective" process of giving the money to the guy with most bullet points on his list?
A journal is prestigious because the papers it publishes have an allusion of quality, because they are published by a prestigious journal.
A prestigious journal publishes high-quality papers because it can attract high-quality authors and reviewers, because it is a prestigious journal.
A journal is prestigious because researchers choose to (try to) be published in it, because their articles will be widely read by other researchers, because it is a prestigious journal.
If you were trying to bootstrap a new journal, you'd have a tough time; unless you didn't care about its quality.
The bare minimum would be a staff who have the time and skill to sift through obviously junk papers and then know which reviewers to use for the legitimate papers. Your best bet would probably be to assemble a staff of well-regarded researchers in whatever field(s) you wanted the journal to cover.
> If you were trying to bootstrap a new journal, you'd have a tough time; unless you didn't care about its quality.
You could (should?) start by going through freely published (open access) papers, collecting the most quality ones, then publishing them in your journal. That's most of the value of journals, as well - informing the subscribers of noteworthy research.
But how do I do that? I can interpret a paper and apply it to my problems, but I'm not qualified to tell if it's a good paper[1]. In my field -- computing -- research papers are often written in a language that only just makes sense to me. I'm sure it'd be easier if I was a computer scientist that regularly published, but that's why I suggest you'd need a team of actual scientists who are used to reading, writing, and reviewing papers.
As Kernighan almost wrote:
Reviewing the paper is twice as hard as reading the paper in the first place. Therefore, if you have to be as clever as possible to read the paper, you are, by definition, not smart enough to review it.
[1] Although I can tell whether the code works, the quality of a paper is also about how well-written it is, whether the arguments are valid and supported by the data, and whether it provides something future research can be built on. A terrible paper that happens to contain code that works is useful for me, not so much for science in general.
I believe tomp's suggestion is that you can bootstrap as an overlay journal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal ) to build up that expertise. You don't need to have experienced people from the start, because they can learn while doing. At the start, no one is going to pay attention to the journal. Then as it gets known for being a good curator, people will start requesting to be reviewed for inclusion. Poof you've got a journal.
You might even start with only yourself. And in 5 years if you want to distance yourself from your earlier, naïve efforts, then simply announce a name change.
Here's the ugly truth - it's hard to tell if most papers are "good", and there are many types of "good".
Distancing yourself from early failures is never a good strategy. Too often we flee from our past failures. For me, I don't shy from them but admit they occurred, and that I have learned from them since.
Perhaps I used the term incorrectly. I don't mean "distance" to require someone to "flee" nor not admit its connection, nor do I regard naïvety as a failure.
In my field, the main journal used to be "Journal of Computer Documentation". It spun off from "American Documentation" in the early 1960s. The JCD title changed in the 1970s to "Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences" because "documentation" - a 1920s term - was considered already old-fashioned by the 1960s, and the title didn't capture the new focus on computers, and the underlying principles of information science.
It then became "Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling" in 2005 because the 1990s showed how to apply those information techniques to make predictive models.
Each name change is a form of distancing itself from its previous focus as part of a shift to a new focus.
Or is "distance oneself" not applicable for that situation?
I think I probably got my wires crossed. By "distancing" I did indeed think you meant "pretend as best as possible previous work never happened in an attempt to protect your reputation", but that's not at all what you meant! Sorry about that.
Do these actually exist? I would love a "This Week in Vision Research" that has 1-2 paragraph summaries of recent papers, maybe with some attempts at critiques and placing the results in context.
Faculty of 1000 is the only thing I know of that's even close to this.
http://processalgebra.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-novelty-of-ar... lists a few more, including "Logical Methods in Computer Science published its first issue ten years ago and has become one of the favourite publication outlets for researchers working on logic in computer science, broadly construed."
Right, you probably can't do it yourself. Even established journals often have a group of peer reviewers etc. Probably the best idea is for a group of academics to get together and start "sharing" the papers they found useful, acting as a "peer review" group of sorts.
I was just commenting about how to get around the "the journal isn't prestigious so no important research is published in it so it's not prestigious" problem.
Your journal wouldn't ever be considered prestigious or even moderately average if you're re-publishing old articles instead of publishing actual novel research.
You could create a newsletter that's useful to some, but if anyone would consider to publish their new research findings in your journal, then that would be bad for them since it wouldn't be considered anywhere equal to a "proper" publication (since you openly claim to accept non-novel findings as well) and would also prevent them from ever publishing it in any "better" journal since that would not be unpublished research any more.
In practice new good journals are generally started by (sub)communities who know each other and feel that [a topic of] their discipline is not adequately covered by the existing journals. This means that since day 1 they have (a) a source of good new papers that they will want to send there and not elsewhere - the whole reason for them founding the journal, (b) a pool of respected and knowledgeable editors/reviewers (the same community), and (c) initial interest of the community who would all read (and cite) the journal. Given that, the only missing part is recognition by various indexes and funding agencies, which will arrive within a few years (3-5?) if the new journal is well run, productive and gets appropriate citations outside of it.
Your career is based on how "good" the journals are that you publish in.
If I publish a paper in Nature, Nature Genetics, Science, etc. then I can hand-pick my next position. The more glam-journals I publish in, the better my chances for tenure.
This is why the scam is so insidious. The journals are really squatting on academic output so they can be gatekeepers of academic status and of career prospects.
The product of publishing isn't the dissemination of insight and innovation, but of gold stars academics can put on their resumes.
Sci-Hub doesn't just threaten copyright, but the entire status factory.
In practice, people often just put a "draft" of the paper on their personal website without telling their publisher.
Papers in fancy journals are more prestigious, but the papers that get cited the most are the ones with full text freely available on the Web. So, when they can, scientists choose both.
(The better way to do this is to support a publisher that's both high-quality and open-access and submit to their journal.)
It depends on the venue. In computer science, it is often possible, but there are often weird restrictions: embargo delay, only the preprint, must include a link to the publisher version, only on a personal webpage or on certain kinds of repositories, copyright assignment has been signed as well, etc. So you don't always feel comfortable doing it.
Further, we academics are incentivized, in terms of career, to publish in prestigious venues managed by official publishers. We aren't incentivized to publish in open access repositories as well. So, even though most of us want our articles to be disseminated widely, not all of us can find the time to make sure that the paper is also available on an open repository. This is a factor that explains why many articles are not available for free online even in cases where it would be legal for researchers to upload them.
In my field of computer science (visual analytics / visualizations) at least some of the leading journals/conferences officially allow you to put a version of the paper on your website.
Just today we submitted a paper where the copyright form explicitly mentions that.
It depends upon your field and your country but many journals require a copyright assignment. They also often require that the work has not been published elsewhere previously.
This is actually common, at least in mathematics: Researchers simultaneously submit to a traditional journal and to the preprint server http://arxiv.org.
Usually I don't have any difficulties finding contemporary papers. It is papers from, say, thirty years ago, that are usually stuck behind paywalls.
If you are funded by most US or Canadian agencies, you're required to put make something publicly available.
Depending on the journals' contract, it might be the published article, or the final version of the text before they copy-edit/reformat it.
The problem is nobody is going to read them. That's because the people who these scientists are targeting (other established academics, funding sources) choose to ignore the rest of the internet and only read the well known journals. This is almost exclusive to life sciences though. In CS, physics and other disciplines people just upload their preprints on arxiv and don't really bother about impact factors and such.
I don't think most scientists bother much about impact factors. Institutions and funding agencies are the ones who bother about impact factors.
I work in CS and I know that if I want my paper to be read by the community I have to publish in a conference and/or arXiv, as almost no one read journals in CS. But then comes one of the almost infinite assessments the bureaucratic system in my university and country makes me jump through, and what do they look at? Impact factors, and conference publications are worth next to nothing. So I constantly have to juggle between what is good for being relevant and known in the community, and what is good to keep my job, which are often incompatible.
This depends on country, though. In the US, I think the funding agencies have left behind the impact factor fetishism in CS and authors can (and often do) just publish in conferences. But in Spain if you don't publish in journals you just don't get a position in academia, in fact some universities are starting to require > X ISI JCR-indexed publications to be able to become a PhD. And I have heard that in e.g. China it's the same thing.
Actually, quite a few of them do publish at least preprints outside of the peer review journals. For about 80% of the papers I needed recently that were behind a paywall, I managed to find PDFs published by the authors somewhere else.
More and more universities are paying for 'gold' (open) access publication. They're beginning to realise that you get more citations if people can actually read your papers without needing to go through the paywall.
One of the advantages of publication is peer review. When you cite someone's work, if it's in a reputable journal then you can assume that someone reviewed it and would vouch for the quality of the research. You have to take it with a pinch of salt (reviewers are never totally unbiased and they make mistakes), but in fields where research is easy to verify like computer science, a publication in somewhere like Pattern Recognition holds a lot of weight.
If you just cite a random paper that someone's self published on arXiv, you have no real idea whether what's being presented is true. Again, this isn't so much of a problem for CS papers where you can implement and test the work yourself, but for fields like physics where you're relying on other people's data, you want to be sure that someone smarter than you checked the numbers.
You are absolutely right. Scientists are the only ones to blame for this. It's true, as someone else replied to you, that scientists tend to chose journals based on their reputations but it's also true that nothing prevents a scientist from publishing their unedited manuscript on their personal websites. It's absolutely legal and absolutely uncommon.
Couldn't the researchers simply publish their own papers? Make torrents etc? Or are they prevented from doing that somehow?