in economics almost every paper of significance is now available in some form free on the Internet before it is published in a journal. Yet economics journals that keep their articles behind paywalls and charge hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for library subscriptions continue to thrive.
This is apparently because the journal editors and referees are still needed to certify the quality of research, certification that informs hiring and tenure decisions and provides information on the relative quality of university academic departments. Also, scholars who want to cite others’ work in their own academic papers need access to the published versions to make sure they get the wording and the page numbers right.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
These days, I am seeing the world through Martin Gurri’s lenses, as a conflict between the uncredentialed public and the credentialed elites. Thanks to the Internet, the uncredentialed public now has as much access to information as the credentialed elites. One consequence of this is that institutions like accreditation, selective college admission, faculty tenure, and publication come to be seen less and less as essential tools to promote scholarly quality and more and more as artificial gate-keeping.
“… institutions like accreditation, selective college admission, faculty tenure, and publication come to be seen less and less as essential tools to promote scholarly quality and more and more as artificial gate-keeping.”
Well, yeah, that’s what happens when on an open-to-all platform like the internet “the uncredentialed public now has as much access to information as the credentialed elites.” All the information and fancy that one can imagine is available to everybody. Global warming data and climate change denialism, it’s just a matter of web postings really. Gun control and 2nd Amendment activism, click Yes or No on our web survey, and Make A Difference. Restrict immigration by Muslim interlopers who will steal our jobs and impose Sharia law? Sign our petition and Preserve The America We Love! Stop the athiests who will teach evolution to Our Children! Defend the police from legal attacks by welfare leeches! Defend the police from obscene lyrics in rock star anthems!
And so on. Do you want to live in a country, fifty years from now, which is governed by the Collective Wisdom of the Internet? Or should we find ways to screen out this nonsense and govern ourselves sensibly despite the seas of ignorance and depravity and racism that surround us? Or can we go on as we have been indefinitely?
Although I am skeptical of the value of peer review, and I am mad at for-profit academic publishers for their cartel-like rent extraction (see Ted Bergstrom’s papers), I am also annoyed at Fox for his flippant tone. He seems to imply that academic peer review is rubber-stamping. Having refereed hundreds of manuscripts, I know it is anything but.
Peer review, while far from perfect, is useful. The question is, can we design peer review without the expensive journal system? Yes, I’m sure we can. The medium itself is not so important (except for nostalgic value). But the verification done by reviewers and editors is valuable.
On occasion it’s something much closer to a traditional racket without any good justification. About four years ago a bunch of academics – including Scott Aaronson and Fields medalist Timothy Gowers – finally revolted against the particularly egregious practices at Elsevier.
It’s particularly annoying when one learns that a professor at a public institutions using a federal grant has published a paper which the public taxpayer still cannot see without paying $35 or something per article, despite having paid for the salaries of the professor and his assistants, the grant, the overhead for his office, etc.
I think when comparing formalized refereeing vs. the uncredentialed internet it’s best to remember that in the long run, the comparison ends up being between formality and the best amateurs, which is quite different than the public at large.
And open ended verification has the additional benefit of allowing for various types of optionality which would not be able to take place in a closed-ended system.
A lot of rent-extraction schemes sprout from quality-control mechanisms. First you have a market shrouded in ignorance. Crooked participants (snake-oil salesmen) reduce the value of the market for everyone else. No one is happy. Then someone introduces a reputation system (medical-school diplomas). That improves the expected value of transactions for most participants and the market grows. The reputation system inevitably coalesces around some supernodes (famous medical schools). The supernodes recognize they can act as gatekeepers. They start to demand bribes, I mean, “a share of the surplus which other participants gain from smooth market operation” (high tuition). The gatekeepers and sellers in the market realize they could both benefit from splitting oligopoly profits if the gatekeepers restricted entry (small student body). But cartel enforcement is always a problem, so the conspirators offer a share of the profits to a third entity– government– in return for cartel enforcement (medical licenses limited to graduates of “accredited” schools, plus the US government strictly limits the number of medical internships).
We shall see how long it takes for Uber and Lyft to gain the government regulation they covet to “stabilize” (read, cartelize) their business.
I agree about Uber and Lyft. Though I am pleasantly surprised that I an name as many as two names in the same market.
The internet is, after all, a network, with effects. It throws up “supernodes” like nobodys business. The saving grace at the moment is that so many new potential supernodes are being thrown up in different-but-related fields, that everyone is kept off balance.
I doubt this will be true in 30 years time.
Steve McIntyre became a pretty big pain point for Michael Mann and company, and rightly so, from what I can gather, so there definitely is something to be said for the amateurs.
I appreciate amateurs as a part of the scientific process, but here is the painful irony to me: you have one party claiming that “we” are anti-science because we don’t ask science to do things that are really anti-science. It’s not science for people who don’t even qualify to be termed amateurs to blindly follow a handful of papers and raw data from an enclave of clearly interested scientists. Real scientific data and techniques are vetted over years if not decades through direct and indirect replication. And “a majority of scientists agree” isn’t an excuse either, because the causality runs both ways. I’ll bet this alleged majority of scientists became “convinced” not because they are sub-genre experts in clilmate science, but because they were marketed that it was not in their interests to not be in agreement.
I nowadays think that the peer-review process is pretty unscientific. It’s more a process that an existing in group can pick and choose which other people they want to admit to their group.
I’m not even completely sure how I ever thought otherwise, and I invite others to really think about this. I was taught as a child that professors are the smartest people in their area. Is it any more than because, as a child, teachers are the smartest people in their area that you directly encounter?
What is it about academia–I refuse to call them “scientists”–that is supposed to make them so much smarter than everyone else? Teaching classes will help you learn ways to explain things, and it will force you to think things through yourself, but it also creates a strong bias against celebrating your prior beliefs as being better than they probably are. Is it peer review? Doesn’t peer review just make you be like all the other people in your community? That’s circular, isn’t it? What makes the community good?
I’ve nowadays seen seen a lot of the other side, and real-world academia is not scientific at all. I know many successful academics personally, and by and large they have just made an efficient business around paper pushing and grant application.
The successful ones I know are not at all interested in what I would think of as scientific methodology, for example, repeatable experiements to test an evolving body of theory. Rather, the successful academics jigger around their apparatus until they get the result they wanted out of it for a particular data set, and then they publish it and start the cycle over for the next paper. For grants, they refer to all their papers, and they align those papers with the currently popular keywords that are trying to be funded. I’ve always had mixed feelings whether I should have learned this process better, or stuck to my guns about scientific reasoning the way I did. Either way seems stinky, and I am nowadays glad to be far far away from the whole charade.
In academic seminars, I remember professors often openly disagreeing about the very basics of their field with each other. How can that happen in a scientific field? Once in a while, sure, but shouldn’t everyone there be eagerly devising experiments to test out the basics of your area? Not in my experience they don’t. However, they could very well tell you *who* was standing behind each theory.
Meanwhile, professionals outside of academia are voting with their feet that academic journals aren’t that convincing. Academics do well with explanations, and they do well with more mathematical areas. When it comes to emperical science, though, they seem pretty bad. Outside of the harder sciences, they really are just playing the popularity game.
Maybe the rest of us should take note as well. Lots of people idolize their teachers as kids and just never have a reason to reconsider. A cooler, older head might pause to consider that people who are really good at something, usually have something better to do with their time than teach it.
Journal articles aren’t intended for the public. They are akin to imternal memos. The information in them useful to the public may in fact be “free” because the end product is what is assimilated into review articles, magazines, textbooks and pharmaceuticals, etc. Not having to read journal articles is a benefit.
Lawyers use a book, called The Bluebook, to determine how to cite sources. It is several hundred pages long and fairly comprehensive. One of the things in it that has changed over the past 20 years is citation to the internet. It now acknowledges that the internet is often the best or only place to get information.