Journals (lifted from The Conversation)

Open-access science: be careful what you wish for

The system of journal publication that now exists is a baroque excrescence that must be reconfigured for the ground up. Essentially, we're trying to make work a model that emerged from the Royal Society in 1665, and its age is showing. As Booker remarks, journal publication doesn't include the raw data, when it now can.

The problem is that G appears to work on the basis that whatever is, is right. The requirement for journal publication, the existence of an enormous number of overlapping journals of casuistically graduated status, the the existence of an large number of universities of casuistically graduated status - the whole jerrybuilt structure seems so familiar that it seems impossible now to change it.  I think it's likely to collapse under its own weight.

G, where would you have got to if you were free to work on a blank sheet and design a dissemination system that you actually wanted?

Mind you, I write from the perspective of an ex-journal editor in the human 'sciences', where the flaws of the old model are much more marked and the advantages hardly detectable.

and mind you (2), a referee's eye might have noted that Geraint said "The importance of peer-reviewed publications to the career of a scientist cannot be understated" when he clearly meant "The importance of peer-reviewed publications to the career of a scientist cannot be overstated."