Today I got an email inviting me to contribute to a journal called SRX Neuroscience. The journal is “peer-reviewed open-access”. The email continued: “There are many reasons to submit your work to SRX Neuroscience, including an efficient online submission process, no page limits or restrictions on large data sets, immediate publication upon acceptance, and free accessibility of articles without any barriers to access, which increases their visibility.”
I’d never heard of it. Its web page didn’t open. The website for SRX (short for Scholarly Research Exchange) was extremely vague: no names, no location. And no sign of how it was funded.
Finally I learned that SRX is run by Hindawi Publishing, in Egypt. From this excellent overview I learned its money comes from author fees, $500 or more per article. They are trying a new kind of editorship: 30 editors or more per journal. Each editor handles only two articles a year and receives a 50% discount when they themselves submit an article. (I wonder what referees get.) Meanwhile, BioMed Central, a better-known open-access publisher, is having trouble: They have been forced to raise their charges to libraries so high that Yale decided to cancel.
It seems very low-rent. But, as Clayton Christensen told in The Innovator’s Dilemma, this is often how important new things begin. In the beginning hydraulic shovels were only good for digging a ditch in your backyard. The makers of cable-powered shovels, whose products made the giant holes for skyscrapers, turned up their noses at such a low-prestige task. But the hydraulic shovels got better and better. Companies that made cable-powered shovels eventually went bankrupt.
My hypothesis: People aged 33 and above have a irrationally negative view of self published info on the internet. At 50 and above it’s complete taboo. Below those ages people are more likely to filter self published material less stringently. Their mental filters will be equivalent to what I (age 35) would use to filter a radio commercial. There will be no more internet stigma.
The result would be that in three decades it will be acceptable to self publish many results and cheaper for lay people to read primary sources. The scientific community’s “immune system” will have been reinvented into something still very flawed but better than the journals used today.
That’s a falsifiable hypothesis and I’m sticking with it.
Put another way, Journals have been dead for over a decade, except for the fact that other forms of self publishing have been unnaturally stigmatized. I think the stigma will clear and science will find a cheaper way of “blessing” important results.
Darin,
I suspect you’re right. Here’s a more general formulation of your hypothesis:
“1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.” — Douglas Adams
David
What does this publishing company really do to justify their income? I’m not a scientist, but my dad used to edit a journal and he told me how it worked. He worked for free since it was supposedly prestigious, the authors didn’t get paid anything, and the publisher charged $50 a copy to university libraries. This may have made sense in those pre-internet days when you had to publish it on dead trees and coordinate with university libraries, but now you could just put it on a website for essentially nothing.
Andrew, there are “pseudo-journals,” such as the SRX journals, and there are “real” journals with very low impact factors — such as many journals. I’m not sure drawing a sharp line between them makes sense. At least the SRX journals are trying something new. If I recall correctly, they reject about half of the submissions.
rps, the company aggregates content (e.g., many neuroscience articles in one place) and organizes the review process. It has about 200 employees.