No no no no....<p>Don't give them more money! Journals already have far too much power. They already publish research in a way that serves their own financial needs. They are too slow. They make you do all the writing, editing, formatting and figure design for free, then they charge people to read your publicly funded research. They make you put your data in an excel spreadsheet or a PDF. They fail miserably at peer review. At my institution, editors of nature journals are going around and giving seminars on how to publish in their journal - journal editors giving SEMINARS to ACTUAL SCIENTISTS. Absurdity.<p>All of this will sink journals. They just don't know it yet. Their strategy seems to be to become more like news outlets, publishing opinion pieces on how to fix scientific publishing, yet never actually changing what they do. The only reason it survives is because more than anybody, scientists learn to put up with all sorts of shit.
While I appreciate the trend towards open-access and wider dissemination, I don't think that the <i>slowness</i> of dissemination is one of the bigger problems in medicine.<p>Given that the subject deals with trying to "fix" complex, organic systems, it's worth taking time to get things right before designing interventions. It is important to realize that a flood of rapid communication often makes it harder to settle on the underlying truth (as clearly evidenced by the recent atmosphere) by rendering the search process unstable.<p>As some other articles (on the HN front page) have recently argued, the rush to faster publication is one of the biggest causes of research debt. And I think that is a much more important problem to solve. So, by all means let's have open-access and also more distilled dissemination. But optimizing for speed (eg: race to publish) often gets in the way of correctness.
Loved the end of the article:<p>Having survived three and a half centuries, scientific journals will no doubt be around for a long time yet. With luck, though, they will return to being science’s servants, rather than its ringmasters.
The majority of journals I know provide an open-access option: you pay a few thousand dollars publication fee such that everyone else in the world can read the electronic version for free. PNAS has this option. Nature, I believe, make an article free in several months/a year if you opt to open access. A few funding bodies, such as Wellcome Trust, have requested to publish in the open access model for several years (these funding bodies pay for the publication fee as long as you can get your paper accepted). I am not sure what the Gates foundation is doing differently here.
Article is about free access to bio/med research. Some thoughts:<p>Would love to see rate of adoption of new standards of evidence based medical care as a function of institutional access to top journals or simply Uptodate (the tool people actually use nowadays). Access to curated guidelines may be more clinically important than primary lit.<p>One reason prestigious journals are great is you get the imprimatur of success for further funding/promotion without needing to wait for citations and scientific consequence. Perhaps an opensource analytics team will over time convert the community to other metrics like reads, shares, and other h-factoresque metrics (granted all are contrived and gamable to some degree), perhaps tied to some funding consequences. Cough, ResearchGate, cough.<p>Regarding thread title:
The small number of good medical findings are disseminated far too slowly; the large number of irreproducible, contradictory, poorly supported, and statistically misinterpreted findings are disseminated far too quickly. Couldn't resist.
For those not in the field, it's worth noting that a good deal of research is disseminated prior to publishing (or while "in press"/waiting to be published) via conferences or word of mouth.
It says that the fact that physicists share more their work than biological sciences, because the first ones are more computer savvy. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that biological science papers are more forged due to Big Pharma profit motivations. Physicists have more difficult to manipulate their data.