Do We Still Need Journals?

There seems to be an open debate on whether the current system of peer-review actually weeds out papers correctly. This experiment re-submitted 12 already approved papers and 89% of the peer reviewers said the paper shouldn’t be published. More recently hundreds of sham papers managed to get through the process as scammers posed as guest editors.

We live in a very different world today than we did when journals were circulated through print: One with the Internet, where data and research don’t need to be circulated in limited and expensive publications. Research can be shared almost immediately with massive networks of scientists through blogs, preprints [1] , data storage platforms and onl... See more

Peer review was a huge, expensive intervention. By one estimate, scientists collectively spend 15,000 years reviewing papers every year. It can take months or years for a paper to wind its way through the review system, which is a big chunk of time when people are trying to do things like cure cancer and stop climate change. And

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