Years ago, to know the work of other researchers we had only two ways: attending conferences and reading the publications (hard copy at that time) on the renowned journals.
At present, why we still consider the process of publication? A lot of predatory journals, many open access journal accept papers in so few days that a normal peer review process is debatable.
A couple of reviewers are really better than what any researcher can comment (with positive or negative meaning) if you download on RG or LinkedIn?
Is it still worth for some specific reasons or just for the academic goal "Publish or Perish"?
André Freitas
that could be right but no longer now, at that past time were some specific journals were renowned and a peer review process was accurate. Generally, more than a year from submission to publication (if accepted …) was the rule, not the exception.
I think publishing in a journal is worth it if the peer review process is rigorous. The journals have the responsibility of ensuring the peer review is performed well and is not time-bound. As you said, it used to be a year-long process. In this case, it should not be like the reviewer is just not doing it for 11 months and doing everything in the 12th month and effective peer-review was only a couple of months. The rigorous peer review should aim to verify methods and the soundness of data (if experimental) and whether authors are comparing their simulations with the right data. Furthermore, efforts should be made to make the data or code available for other researchers to be able to reproduce the results. I have seen some papers published in very reputed journals but when I tried to reproduce the results using the given approach, it was simply not possible without using some tuning parameter which was never mentioned in the published article.
In my opinion, a formal peer review in a journal often times gives a chance to authors to improve the quality of results, sometimes even adding more transparency in the results. RG and LI can be a good platform to initiate the discussions, but it lacks the rigor of the formal peer review process.
I think that the classical peer-review/publishing approach only makes sense if it is extremely rigorous on every aspect of the review. That is, peer-review only makes sense if it actually is a quality guarantee, like with an ISO standard to follow, but time has shown that it is very far from it. I'm not even considering predatory journals and the like, as even top journals have shown to be prone to publish the most ludicrous stuff, with the most obvious problem being that reviewers don't really know anymore anything at all these days (so a lot of obvious or old stuff gets published again, not to mention completely wrong stuff). Obviously, there might be differences between fields, but it is especially so in STEM.
One should also take in mind that research and the relative publishing (should) have nothing to do with employment and career paths, at least officially. So, when we think about it, we should not, honestly, try to fix it in order to make it work as a job market tool. I hold this truth to be self evident.
So, the relevant question is, in my opinion: how do we save research and publishing from the misuses that make it today so low quality? My answer is that, unfortunately, we can't, or at least not yet as of today. We currently live in a society that has had a repentine shift in a lot of paradigms, with the result that we failed in preserving the cultural background of most aspects of our life because of the speed. So, the current society, not anymore aware of the past, needs to understand from failure what could have been preserved by culture.
Authors have their faults too, of course. I have seen really shameful stuff submitted by otherwise respected researchers, just to make numbers. This is how bad the system is working. Even the good researchers do really bad stuff just to increase their numbers.
I think that a suitable model could be just like a wikipedia, with each article being an independent and dynamic entity, subject to fully tracked non blind reviews from whoever thinks to do so and the relative changes exposed. Most importantly, nobody can impose anything on the original author.
But, in the end, even a good model could be hard to manage. There's really too many people now publishing. I currently have a hard time just reading abstracts from interesting papers from top journals in my field, as they are too many (just from the title, of course).
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