Very interesting perspective. In the USA, you still need Journal publications to be tenured and promoted at most institutions.

Hi Dragan,

I can see where your frustrations might lie - but I think that we are a long way away from saying goodbye to the 'big' journals and publishing houses. Publishing houses are looking to adapt i.e Elsevier buying out Mendeley etc - so they will be there for some time to come in various forms. Add to that the fact that not only a proportion of established journals will be perceived as negligent or incompetent. Personally, if I have a poor experience with a journal - then I don't bother submitting to them again and I advise my peers to look elsewhere as well. Sooner or later these journals are found out - and it often means a change of editors etc.

I also think that it is the 'competitive market' that has exacerbated the perception of incompetence. The fact is that the 'publish or perish' phenomenon is alive and well in academia. Getting published is highly competitive and so, the more that authors have their work rejected, the more they might believe that the system is unfair. I, personally, would not advise your strategy of publishing exclusively on academic media sites. Many universities (i.e. in Australia) use international/national metrics i.e. ERA/Scimago rankings to define the 'quality' of journals. There is an increasing push for performance expectations to publish say in Scimago Q1 journals. These may often be the type of journals that you would refer to as the 'big' journals.

Very interesting perspective. In the USA, you still need Journal publications to be tenured and promoted at most institutions.

I am katially agree with you sir! Juornals are still representing the backbone of academic research works.

Respected sir Dragan, Thank you for sharing this,

I have taken the sigh of relief to read, what you have written;! Looking forward to do the same with my research work on RG or Academia.edu.

'Publish or perish' OR 'to publish and be damned' this is, for some, the dilemma. Once you become wedded to being judged by an academic performance/career advancement it has to be the former but if you have the courage it can be the latter. I agree with Dragan, our work should be judged on its merits but this can only happen if we are willing to publish what we truly believe will make a difference!

Sorry RG Platform is Excellent Base for Beginners and Experts Researchers But Cannot replace Journals with High Impact Factor IF or I10 H Indexed. Regards

To early "Goodbye" until scientists work is evaluated based on the publication in journlas indexed in Big Important Databases...

Ask the scientists in the countries, where they need to publish in journals with IF, or SJR to still have a job or to develope their careers,.Ror them publishing in RG just to develope knowledge and exchange ideas is not acceptable :(

No doubt, this idea of free bublishing with global access is very promissing.

To ALL.

I understand that you may be anxious that your performance will not be appreciated at your university if you do not publish in some of the “big journals”.

Thanks for the responses anyway. I appreciate your attitudes and positions for or against, optimism or pessimism, approval or disapproval. However, I would more appreciate your ARGUMENTS: why yes, why no?

For example:

My university would not accept RG or Academia.edu scores.

My employer would like to see IF or h-index.

Grant applications contain a field “IF”.

Etc.

I will slightly exaggerate.

Continuing the established way of valorization of the scientists' work on the account of blind summing up of IF, h-index or other similar scorings WITHOUT really examining concrete and deep contents of the scientist’s papers is not science and is simply bad.

By grant applications the reviewers read your proposed project but most often they simply do not read your other papers. By job applications also, you are rejected or asked to come to the interview, to presentation, just on the account of the blind scores of IF. This is done just in this trivial manner in many institutions in Europe and probably elsewhere.

On the other hand, when you submit a paper to a big journal, at least 50% of the reviewers are incompetent or extremely negligent. Journals have difficulties to engage good reviewers and the reviewers just do not have time to read your paper attentivelly, and this is just one of number of problems produced by overproduction of the scientific journals.

Do we need a better system of evaluation of scientific papers? What do you think? Can RG or Academia.edu replace the old routines?

I believe big journals will continue to be of paramount importance for a long time ahead. RG is as of now only a way to further spread our work that has been published by journals. It’ll take quite a lot of time for RG to replace the prestige of big journals.

Publications in Peer Journals = Recognition/citations = Potential grant $ so good luck, if you do not need any of the last 2, I guess you will be fine

Laurent

Sorry NO. This is exactly the point.

If you will be in the commission for some candidates for assistantship or professor posts at your university, oakay, look up his scores - but READ his work too! Please.

Also: Ask your university to demand the scientific commissions, that review the applications of the potential researchers / professors, to READ THEIR papers and to pay LESS ATTANTION to their absolute scores of IF, h-indexes and similar. If we would all do this, science would not be a victim of lazy, uninformed reviewers any more!

In Mexico is impossible because Elsevier and Clarivate took the control of Conacyt, the national system to impulse the cientific generation of knowledge. But your idea is so important, because we have to focus on quality and not in statistics or impact factor.

In Mexico, it will not be possible until the vision of CONACYT changes

Respected sir, Dragan Pavlovic,

Respected, Laurent F Bornaghi's answer is depicting true picture, For me, as I do not need grants, and big names of high impact factor journals; so , I am happy that you shared that thread and I was benefited.

Stay blessed you all!

I agree with you. Indeed, paper quality must precede anything including high IF journals. We must be dedicated to quality and many high IF journals paradoxically ensures this all important element.

RG can never replace International journal. You need to still publish in those international journals. RG can make such publications more visible

Very interesting, very courageous, I totally agree, though there are some drawbacks, some of them mentioned by colleagues. Thanks @Dragan Pavolic

Nyc concept but without good journal articles- career ll be stoped..

Not at all.

I published very large number of articles and I have high impact factor (IF), but indeed I know: what counts it is the content of the articles and NOT just the STATISTICS!!!

I showed that even “The Science” can publishes lousy work (Bohannon’s article).

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260527037_The_last_bite_was_deadly_-_About_responsibility_in_scientific_publishing

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60

https://content.iospress.com/articles/clinical-hemorheology-and-microcirculation/ch1820

Therefore I propose, read the articles, do not judge the people's work on the account only of the NUMBER of published articles; ask your colleagues to do the same; ask the commissions at your university not to rely just on the statistics the secretaries will offer them when judging the candidates for academic jobs. Ask them to read the works! And you - do not boast with the journal title where you published, boast with the work you did and the results that you obtained. Boast with contents of your work and not with the statistics!

Not at all

Hm, could you guys explain me what "Not at all" should mean?? What is this that you want to say, please?

So who is going to judge the "quality" of your work if you give up on peer reviewed publications? Do you really trust your so-called colleagues to make that judgement when you come up for tenure or promotion? Also, I consider personally citations to be one of the useful "statistics" (ie.e., recognition of your work by others in your field), but your proposal would also eliminate. Do you really want to replace citations "likes" on social media?

As for even journals like Science publishing unacceptable journals, I don't believe that they can stop every determined fraudulent author, but what is the rate of fakery? I'd say it is far less than one in a thousand, and if so, then you are proposing to throw not just the baby but the whole family out with the bath water.

David,

In my career I had about 10-20 unfair or really incompetent reviews and may be up to 30-40 fairly incompetent but acceptable reviews (trivial objections, irrelevant demands and similar). This is not much, since this is my subjective judgment and I could be wrong. Indeed, researchers start understanding editorial policies of journals quite late in their career; and some journals are unpredictable or have incapable, inconsistent editors.

Yes, I propose only partial avoidance of the classical journals.

Indeed, an editor will either need a group of experts to examine the submitted articles, or s/he could publish the article (if the text is reasonably well presented and makes sense) and wait for the reactions, critiques, comments of the readers-experts. But I am not discussing the mentioned issue from the point of view of a journal editor; I look from the side of the research. An author may publish hers/his work in “some journal”, may be not important which, but the University jury, the scientific commissions, grant evaluators, will NOT count just impact factors. They may consult the scientific sites,-and forums BUT will also READ the works and they WILL BE the experts – and not just “documentaries”. Of course, as this is already often the case in Europe, they will be chosen at random and not between “your” competing colleagues from your university.

Do you still have a problem there?

One other thing is troubling me too: I am convinced (and have proofs) that any article, if well, basically correctly but cunningly, written, could be published in some medium quality journal. Any kind of research, even absolutely trivial one! This means that what is published need only to be well written; good research basis is not needed. This is also why research reports must be examined carefully and this may need time. Good research has little to do with hastily submissions and fast, “clever” reviewers’ acceptances.

In my career, I've reviewed for 50 different journals, and in my field each reviewer receives copies of the other reviews. What I see is a remarkable consistency in those reviews: things I reject get rejected by the other reviewers, and things I accept get accepted by the other reviewers. When it comes to revise and submit, the requests usually overlap. So, I see no evidence that the peer review process is should be discarded.

And I believe that highly cited journals do deserve to have higher credibility, since this is a clear indicator that other researchers have found the articles in those journals to be of value for their own work.

So, I don't think the system is anywhere near perfect, but it is hardly fatally flawed

Have you also reviewed the famous paper of Alan Sokal?

Over 20 years ago? But as I said earlier, it is hard to stop determined fakery, which makes up a trivial proportion of all publications.

great but not practical now

David

If you agree with your colleagues, this does not prove anything. The reviewers of Sokal’s article also all agreed.…

By the way, complete fake articles are the easiest to write and they can pass the best reviewing procedure. But this was not my point. Sokal demonstrated that the postmodern sociology was problematic.

It may sound strange to you, but in biological sciences and natural sciences, in general, writing nonsense should not be tolerated. And there are nonsensical things in some texts that are often not detected. Okay not terribly often. What is terribly often the case is that people review articles although they know to be incompetent for the subject the articles treat. They do not reject to review the texts for which they do not feel competent. And this is quite frequent.

The famous Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman published his three papers to prove the Poincaré Hypothesis not in a prestigious high-ranking journal, but on the Internet. Nevertheless, it was enough to recognize his work as a great event. Perelman have been spitting on journals and reviewers, he proved this result to satisfy his personal ambitions without any intentions to be rewarded. Yes, this is a unique case. Then in the USA two independent groups of expert mathematicians were created who tried to find a mistake in the proof of Perelman, but could not. In the end, the proof was recognized true and Perelman became famous. In my understanding, in the 21st century, the technology of presenting a scientific result in a traditional scientific journal lags far behind the technology of developing media resources. Everyone understands that we need new ways to present scientific results, but we need to understand well that journals are more business than science. If this is so, then the problem will never be solved. However, what can be contrasted. In my understanding, we must consider scientific articles as a commodity. For some reason, in ordinary life, we buy goods with the understanding that they should provide us with benefits in their use. However, in science is not so. Because scientists want to get an easy way to be recognized in the scientific world, and just for these purposes there are high-rating journals that simply offer their services to realize these goals. Thus we see the usual conjuncture. It is necessary to understand one more important thing - in our time of total globalization, when education around the world has sharply degraded, journals are a very good way to do business.

Dr Gennady Fedulov has pointed a good note in his contribution. One may want to assert ''not possible'' but, in actual fact, this topic is like a sword with two sides; sometimes possible and sometimes may not be real. It won't be a surprise if a researcher publish in a low-standard journal to win Nobel Prize, going by Perelman's situation as cited above. Publishing in low impact factor journals does not not mean it lacks novelty.

On the other hand, ''journals are more of business than science''. I am using this to inform us that even though there is avenue to promote one's study and get recognized, the cost of this may sometimes debar one from publishing a study with high novelty in high-rating journals.

Finally, it is not possible to use RG as possible alternative, because up till now the scoring has not proved to be equal in rank with peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals are like well scrutinized job. On RG, one may not have any single paper and still get score up to 100 than someone who has published 100 papers in high-quality journals and yet has a score of 30, very possible. The scoring system of RG is far below impact factors and currently cannot replace it.

I dont think this can work alone

publishing in journals is a must to your carrer

It is not going to replace but charm will be reduced

Those who write articles for promotion purposes need those international journals.

I believe that this is entirely possible. Many of the concerns in the comments above are rational but do all share a similar undertone: effort. In the current context we are rather passive about what and how things are published as this is mostly in the journals hands. However, if we switch to having a platform such as researchgate for dissemination the community will have to step up and be far more active and vigilant in terms of reviewing what is put out and developing credibility metrics. It feels like this idea, and how much work it would take to enact such a radical change, scares people. Personally, we can do better as a community, and for the world at large. It's time to put the flow of dissemination in the hands of the scientists.

Good bye big journals and also " small ones", both types follow similar rules. Journals dictatorship is not related with science quality or evidence. The most I love science (reading, learning, research), the less i understand science metrics, burocracy, peer review... For me it is a good idea "open access in Researchgate" (No previous payment, just you show what you do in your lab). That is the line I like to follow.

For the momento, i dont think so

May be i am wrong or perhaps you will change your mind (by the moment is a good position)

I am very young to comment. But I think instead of rejecting journals completely, we need to reform how journals process our work. The journals are mostly in researchers control except financial benefits. An honest review process does help the content in the final published articles.

I agree but what is an honest review process? Is it guaranteed today? The authors´rights is also an important point. Journals should be flexible. Not all focus on standarized points with a reviewing process that looks like an algorithm. Ideas(content) are at least of equal importance that appearances( apa rules, statistics....) . Overall it can not be based on rejection of papers. It must respect the researcher.

"Instead of rejecting journals completely "is like accepting journals and peer reviewing process without criticism. Maybe it is not a matter of "all or nothing" but thesystem must be check out with the scientific method and compared with alternative options that can be better in human and scinetific terms. To the contrary, without options there is not freedom (it would be a dictatorship), without scientific checking the system is just a social rule, that can be affected by dark interests external to science (emotional, economical or social status...)