Doing away with scientific journals

I got into a bit of an argument with Björn Brembs on twitter last week because of a statement I made in support of professional editors.  I was mostly saying that professional editors were no worse than academic editors but our discussion went mostly into the general usefulness of scientific journals. Björn was arguing his positions that journal rankings in the form of the well known impact factor are absolutely useless. I was trying to argue that (unfortunately) we still need journals to act as filters. Having a discussion on Twitter is painful so I am giving my arguments some space in this blog post. Björn arguments are based on this recently published review regarding the value of journal ranking (see paper and his blog post). The one line summary would be: "Journal rank (as measured by impact factor, IF) is so weakly correlated with the available metrics for utility/quality/impact that it is practically useless as an evaluation signal (even if some of these measures become statistically significant)." I covered some of my arguments before regarding the need of journals for filtering here and here. In essence I think we need some way to filter through the continuous stream of scientific literature and the *only* current filter we have available is the journal system. So lets break this argument in parts. Is it true that :  we need filters;  journals are working as filters; there are no working alternatives ? We need filters I hope that ...
Source: Public Rambling - Category: Bioinformaticians Tags: publishing Source Type: blogs