THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Your first line is misleading; this has nothing to do with peer-review.  And read the comments to the first article (the second was blocked or gone for me):  there are a number of strategies discussed to get the same content from the same journals for free.  In particular, if you know the author, check out the author’s own academic web page.  It will often have a free pdf copy of the exact same article.  Peer-reviewed and all.

The second link seems to be dead when I click on it.

I’ve mostly managed to maintain access to online journals through a university affiliation (part-time work, things like that) over the years, and it had made a lot of things possible in my full-time work. It’s obvious that the system is set up to only take advantage of universities and other orgs that need regular access. $20-$50 per article is obviously far too much for almost anyone to justify for what amounts to an unknown product (abstracts aren’t exactly great info to go by).

I don’t think the Atlantic article is advocating for an end to peer-review, though, just an end to the locked-gate model after peer review. BTW, many professors used to have copies of their own published work available on their faculty web-pages. I suspect this have been cracked down on though.

Also, Google Scholar is a long way from being as good as academic specific search engines. It’s OK, and a good starting point for non-experts, but it’s still not as good as something like PubMed, if you are using PubMed properly.

as a recently graduated MBA, I’d like to add HBS case studies as another absurd academic racket. i really hate those dudes.

also, as #1 and #2 have mentioned, it’s not an end to peer-review at all, it’s an end to the needless for-profit publishing middlemen. the model already exists, they just have to overcome institutional inertia and permanently move everything from atoms to bits. very interesting topic tho.

related commentary:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/authors-vs-journals.html

The second link has an extra ‘l’ at the end of it. Once that is removed, it works.

A few additional additional facts:

- For some journals, the author has to pay a publication fee. Sometimes it’s just if you want to include color graphs. Other times it’s a flat fee for the privilege of the journal profiting off your content. I think PNAS, Science and Nature all do this. Presumably this is to pay for the costs of publication, but with everything moving to the web it’s more about subsidizing these old publishing houses.

- Reviewers and editors do these jobs for publishing houses for free as part of “service”. I have provided hours and hours of free labor to a number of publishing houses. Part of the deal is that my papers have been similarly reviewed by others and presumably made better.

- Like health care, the users of the journals generally don’t see the costs involved - the school library pays the exorbitant fees, so the motivation for change is somewhat sapped.

- There is a new policy that if your research is funded by the NIH, anything you publish must be provided to the public for free. I forget the technical details of how it works, but I think you can get a lot of NIH-funded material from pubmed or something similar. I don’t think this policy has yet spread to NSF, DoD, DoE etc.

4/
I think that idea is patently absurd. It’s bad enough that oftentimes a paper is reviewed based on the famousness of the author and not the quality of the contents if review is only single-blind. Journals should be publishing the best research, not the most famous authors. That someone would suggest otherwise baffles me.

I’d also like to point out the Frontiers open-source journals, in addition to the ones mentioned in the article.

#6

Some, probably most, journals have academics who volunteer time for editorial purposes, but some have professional staffs.

The NIH policy is below.  The 12 mo embargo is probably not a major concern for the curious tax payer, but obviously long enough to ensure that anyone doing active research needs to have the expensive journal access.

SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

Finally.