The (Broken) Academic Publishing System

One thing many scientists have been griping about for a while is the broken system we have for disseminating scientific information. Among the complaints:

• Motivation - The peer-review system does not sufficiently motivate reviewers to provide a critical review of papers. It is far easier to sing the praises of a paper and spend half the time reviewing it, than to trash it.
• Quality - There is a little too much of the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" dynamic at play. Authors that have historically produced high quality work often get follow-on publications rubber stamped by reviewers, just on the basis of reputation, not on the individual merits of the work in review. There has also been a flood of "me too" journals, perhaps in response to complaints about cost, that publish arguably inferior work to their more well known counterparts.
• Money - The large publishers, like Elsevier, charge institutions and individuals an arm and a leg for journal subscriptions and individual articles (exceeding >$100 per article in some cases!). Only the largest of institutions can afford these, leaving the curious, scientifically-minded taxpayer who funds this research out of the loop.

How do we fix this? There is a growing movement for an open-source model to academic publishing that has worked in other disciplines like code development. One such example is arXiv, which began in Physics and has spread to other disciplines. From their website:

arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. Submissions to arXiv must conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned and operated by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. arXiv is funded by Cornell University Library and by supporting user institutions. The National Science Foundation funds research and development by Cornell Information Science. 

arXiv has its own scientific advisory board and has "published" over 700,000 e-print articles to date, seeming to have all the trappings of a legitimate publisher.

In disciplines like particle physics, particularly with the experiments coming out of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the open-source movement is well established and has a legitimacy associated with it. Why is that? Well, a project like the LHC involves many hundreds of researchers spread out across the world, was funded by several countries, and involves experiments whose finding are potentially so important (e.g., the discovery of gravitons) that the results must be widely and easily disseminated. Without the input of many other researchers, many of whom will attempt to replicate the results disclosed, no one will trust the legitimacy of those papers.

Unfortunately, not all research is this high impact and involves as much investment from the scientific community, and that is the uphill challenge we face. While the system works and is necessary in these specialized sub-disciplines of Physics, the key question is, how do you motivate scientists in other disciplines who have results worthy of a top-tier journal (like Science or Nature) to publish their results in an open-source journal? Why on earth would an Assistant Professor do that, and potentially jeopardize their tenure? Well, they wouldn't.

Hopefully, with the involvement of enough well published scientists (and a few Nobel Laureates thrown in there) we can start to build some steam in other fields like Chemistry and Biology.