So are Are Academic Journals Obsolete?
My last post highlights the question and here are some varying opinions
1) Interweb based debate, this Slashdot article appears to go along the lines of yes they’re needed as it a mechanism for “Peer review with Quality in mind”
2) Paper based debate, this paper by Bora Zivkovic provides a very interest prediction for research papers
scientific paper of the future will be a work in progress — with different people with different skills and talents contributing to a body of work sequentially: one has the idea, another turns it into a hypothesis, another designs the experiments, another runs them, another analyzes the data, another visualizes them, another interprets them, another places several such pieces of work together into a historical and philosophical context and finishes writing the “paper”.
B. Zivkovic, The future of the scientific paper, Journal of Science Communication, Volume 07, Issue 02, June 2008, http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/07/02/Jcom0702%282008%29C02/Jcom0702(2008)C02.pdf
So this makes me wonder will Open Access Journals be some way to fulfil this prediction? I’ve seen an example of SRE before, here’s another one PLoS One.
Although in both cases the Computer Science papers submissions are quite low
http://www.plosone.org/article/browse.action?catName=Computer+Science
as compared to the other sciences.
But in some ways will we just skip this and just pander to the YouTube generation for example
http://www.jove.com/index/Main.stp