1) Being a good filter, increasing S:N, so you don't have to waste time sieving bullshit yourself
2) Choosing pretty fonts, promoting good stylistic standards and guidelines (which scientists, unfortunately, usually tend not to do great on if left to their devices)
It is I think an acceptable argument that charging an exorbitant price for articles is a bit of a scam, but I don't think it's fair to say that they should earn 0, or that the value they create is of 0 price. Consider that each of Science, Nature, Cell employ a couple hundred employees. If you want a good sieve, you've gotta hire talented editors, if you want articles that are easy to read and easy to understand, you've gotta hire talented graphics artists. Suddenly, this doesn't seem so easy and cheap.
Papers in Nature and Science replicate at lower levels that journals with lower impact factors. That’s not really doing much for signal:noise. If you’re a working scientist you need to keep on top of your field for yourself. Anyone who relies on _journals_ to tell them what’s hot will be woefully out of date. Academia uses journals for archiving, not for dissemination of current research. That’s what pre-prints, working papers, conferences, workshops and seminars are for.
As far as design whether typography or graphic goes Sociological Science charges somewhere around $2,000 per article to authors and it looks just fine.
The claim is that when other people try to replicate the experiments from papers published in Nature and Science, the success rate is lower than when attempts are made to replicate papers published elsewhere.
(I have no knowledge about whether this claim is accurate.)
another study in _Science_, which examined a more general cross-section of psychology studies and reported an even lower rate of successful replication than the one linked earlier (39%): https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.long
the authors of this study detail at least potential reason for the tendency of high-impact (i.e. widely cited) journals and studies to have lower reproducibility rates: major journals tend to prefer publishing "innovative" studies w/ results that have the potential to push the envelope and advance the state of the art. as a result of this position on the extreme cutting edge, though, those kinds of studies are less likely to have really solid results. at the same time, though, they're more likely to inspire attempts to respond to them in one way or another -- leading to more citations.
they note that this emphasis by high-profile journals results in a disincentive to put in the time to do the less glamorous work of reproducing other teams' studies, which is a potentially major issue for the trajectory of science as a whole.
It's an accurate claim, and has been borne out in research.
Science and Nature ... like publishing groundbreaking research, research with surprising outcomes, etc. These categories of findings are more likely a priori to be false, so it's not surprising even with a positive story they are less likely to replicate than a perfectly pedestrian study with an unsurprising finding.
I agree that the filter is where the most value is, but it’s wrong to assume that the publisher is providing it. They’re not. The science community is the ones providing it — for free.
Same with publishing templates. The science community itself provides the style guides and style templates. The publishers provide printing presses. That’s it.
The scientific community can decide to abandon the publishers, and start competing journals, which will automatically transfer the heft away from the original and to the upstart, because it is the community that provides the value.
This may sound idealistic, but this has already happened. The linguistics community abandoned Elsevier’s Lingua and replaced it overnight with Glossa. The linguistic community’s success, then inspired the mathematics community to abandon Springer’s Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics and replace it with Algebraic Combinatorics.
This path is traveled. The pattern established. In 2019 it’s just much easier to start a publication since you need very little economic capital.
They wouldn't even need to start competing journals - often, there already are alternative journals, or preprints would serve the function of dissemination just fine. The main thing that's needed is that they perform the filtering independently of the publication process.
(Disclosure: I'm part of a project that aims to facilitate that.)
Most of the "sieving" is done by reviewers rather than editors, and reviewers are not paid. (There are some journals that pay their reviewers. I don't think any of them pay them much, and Nature and Science are not among their number in any case.)
Given that the vast majority of the papers I read are on Arxiv, linked by researchers online, I just don’t really buy the argument that we need to keep these publishers around. I’m betting that other researchers will still serve as a fine filter.
1) Being a good filter, increasing S:N, so you don't have to waste time sieving bullshit yourself
2) Choosing pretty fonts, promoting good stylistic standards and guidelines (which scientists, unfortunately, usually tend not to do great on if left to their devices)
It is I think an acceptable argument that charging an exorbitant price for articles is a bit of a scam, but I don't think it's fair to say that they should earn 0, or that the value they create is of 0 price. Consider that each of Science, Nature, Cell employ a couple hundred employees. If you want a good sieve, you've gotta hire talented editors, if you want articles that are easy to read and easy to understand, you've gotta hire talented graphics artists. Suddenly, this doesn't seem so easy and cheap.