Do We Still Need Journals?

Whether we like it or not, research is already, easily and increasingly, published outside of journals, and so are reviews. Reforming peer review, therefore, should mean working with the way science is shared in public, not ignoring it.

Journals rely on subsidies and subscriptions from institutional libraries, which pay enormous and growing costs to access articles. People outside of large institutions, without library subscriptions, are largely shut out from reading publicly funded academic research as well as reading the comments that reviewers have made on a paper. And despite ... See more