“At least outside the hard sciences, we may be reaching a time when the question of “What is a professional?” in many areas should be reevaluated and probably democratized.”

I think the hard sciences are no exception. I got pretty jaded as a grad student watching reputedly top journals let garbage slip in to papers by “big names” that they would never accept (and rightly so) from a less established researcher. I decided that if I was going to be in a field with lots of BS, I might as well be in a field where I get paid to shovel it.

Anyway, institutions like the LANL preprint server (with the delightful URL xxx.lanl.gov) are allowing people to bypass journals and their old boy gatekeepers. I saw one case where a paper was rejected by a top journal, sat on arXiv for a year racking up citations, only to have the journal back down and publish the paper. Nothing changed about the science. The editor just realized that the community was paying a lot of attention to this paper and skeedaddled to get back to the front of the parade.

Eventually, when some metric besides journal papers and citations is adopted for grant and tenure decisions, the journal system will collapse. Science will be better off, because part of your training as a scientist is sniffing the BS, and because public scrutiny will be much more fair and complete than secret decisions being made by direct competitors with a monetary interest in your failure. In other words, scientists don’t need anonymous, unaccountable reviewers deciding what they get to read. Sound familiar?