Cog wrote:If you are a geologist of a particular flavor you are publishing in the speciality journals that rockdoc123 referred to. They are also the source information you follow to keep up on current theory and advances.
Not really. If a Geoscientist of any particular flavor makes a truly important new discovery, they are better served to get it published in a top tier journal like SCIENCE or NATURE or NATURE GEOSCIENCE. Of course, its very hard to get a paper accepted---the acceptance rate currently is about 6%, i.e. 94 papers get turned down for every 6 that get published, so only the very best and most important papers ever get into SCIENCE and NATURE.
Because of the severe competition to get published in SCIENCE and NATURE, these top tier journals can pick and choose the very very best scientific papers to publish, and inevitably many of the excellent papers they publish wind up being more important then papers that appear in the second tier journals, which are left with the less important papers. And the prestige of these top tier journals isn't just based on reputation---quantitative studies comparing different journals show that SCIENCE and NATURE have the highest numerical score in terms of
Journal Impact Factor. That means that hard data shows that papers in these top journals get read by more people and are cited by more people when they write their own scientific papers. AND that means the papers good enough to get into SCIENCE and NATURE tend to be highly influential within the sciences and tend to be much more important then papers published in the second tier journals.
For example, Nature had an impact factor of 41.456 in 2014, while most second tier journals have much much much lower impact factors. The Journal of Geology, which xxx mentioned in his diatribe above, has an impact factor of 2.014----only about 5% of the impact factor of Nature. That means in comparison to NATURE very few people read the Journal of Geology and the papers in the Journal of Geology are only rarely cited by other scientists, i.e. they aren't terribly important when compared to the papers coming out in Nature and Science. If you write a paper and publish it in the Journal of Geology and almost no one reads it or cites it in their own scientific work then it isn't very important----how hard is that to understand?
Impact_factorAnother advantage to publishing in SCIENCE and NATURE is that scientists in other countries are much more likely to read SCIENCE and NATURE then they are to read the second tier journals. I've seen this in my own scientific career and in the careers of other scientists in the University world. Its better to do important scientific work that gets published in important journals then it is to piddle away at unimportant things that can only get published in second tier journals. How hard is that to understand?
I'm not saying the second tier journals aren't useful or important --- only that its pretty easy to get papers published in them so they publish a lot of lower quality work. Occasionally important papers paper do come out in the second tier journals, but usually they publish papers that weren't good enough to even be considered for publication in a top tier journal like SCIENCE or NATURE or NATURE GEOSCIENCE ---- its the job of the second tier journals to publish the routine specialty papers that don't make big breakthroughs for the few people interested in those topics.
This is why I don't like the idea of "free open source" publishing. IMHO the current system works just fine for publishing research in the GEOSCIENCEs and other Disciplines. Just about everything gets published, with the groundbreaking research going into the top tier journals, the more routine and specialty papers into the second tier journals, and if its really terrible it still comes out as what is called "grey" literature, i.e. unreviewed reports and personal web sites and lab data dumps.
The current system works, and If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Cheers!