Comments on: Why Journals?

By: optimumcompanies

optimumcompanies — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:05:31 +0000

While most seasoned members of a given field have the ability to discern between quality articles and more poorly written articles. As someone still towards the beginning of my academic career, I’m not sure what I would have done when I was first starting out without those journals to fall back on. While I definitely do see a use for more aggregation and chronicling sites that contain a wider range of articles arranged topically that can be accessed on-demand, I do think that the academic “stamp of approval” can be very useful for newbies. Is it possible that journals may still have a place as such but perhaps ought to be given less import? Thoughts?

By: Ekkehart Schlicht

Ekkehart Schlicht — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 02:58:55 +0000

I agree with the point, but there is a slight misunderstanding. I have not taken “Journals” as meaning “printed journals.” There are many journals that are not printed, but they are ranked, and sometimes highly esteemed, like Berkeley journals. Yet the long-term availability is an issue. But why not preserve everything? Why not have a copyright library for everything? By the way, Thomas Krichel works on establishing a long-term archive for RePEc.

Regarding citation scores, I do not agree with those economists. They seem to have internalized this nonsense, and they must, because their career depends on their rankings.

I have commented on quality rankings in a comment on http://www.andrewdyck.com/the-end-for-journals-is-closer-than-we-think/" here. As explained my blog, I don’t think we need quality rankings, but rather a mechanism to find out relevant contributions, independent of “quality”. My view is that we should care about the progress of economics, not about the problems of hiring committees or, pardon, librarians. These people need and should be given other resources.

And last but not least I would not be so sure that Mendel’s publication would have survived a refereeing process of the nature encountered in economics to-day (but not in other disciplines to that degree).

By: WiBiblo

WiBiblo — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:37:42 +0000

Very good arguments and I agree with most of it.
But as an librarian I have one counter-argument: there is still no acceptable solution for the long-time preservation of electronic documents. As long as there is no solution the printed Paper or Book is still the best long-term preservation medium we have.
Most people forgot that RePEc or Google Scholar are only portals and not archives or libraries. O.K. they are fantastic and great information intermediators but if the publisher of the Paper deletes the document it is lost for RePEc and for future generations.
Sometimes Economics Scientist tell me, that a Paper which is not published in a ranked journal is not worth to archive it in an library. So as a RePEc-Fan You can say, a E-Paper which is not cited in Citec (or not found in RepEc) ist not worth to archive it.
But maybe in the future someone founds out (if it has been long-term preserved) that the ideas in this forgotten paper are very good and relevant for future problems.
I remember of Gregor Mendels inheritance laws (foundation of genetics) which were forgotten at his time and 16 years after his dead rediscovered (because printed in a journal and archived in libraries). Imagine if a nowadays “Sociologist Mendel” post a Paper with relevant content for Economists on a website which is not ranked very high in Google and he is not aware of MPRA, because he is not interested in Economics???

By: The end for journals is closer than we think | Techonomist

The end for journals is closer than we think | Techonomist — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:46:43 +0000

[...] I’m not alone in thinking that the end for journals is near. Both the Economic Logician and Ekkehart Schlicht of the RePEc blog have recently posted about this idea…..in an admittedly more convincing fashion than I would [...]