1) Being a good filter, increasing S:N, so you don't have to waste time sieving bullshit yourself
2) Choosing pretty fonts, promoting good stylistic standards and guidelines (which scientists, unfortunately, usually tend not to do great on if left to their devices)
It is I think an acceptable argument that charging an exorbitant price for articles is a bit of a scam, but I don't think it's fair to say that they should earn 0, or that the value they create is of 0 price. Consider that each of Science, Nature, Cell employ a couple hundred employees. If you want a good sieve, you've gotta hire talented editors, if you want articles that are easy to read and easy to understand, you've gotta hire talented graphics artists. Suddenly, this doesn't seem so easy and cheap.
As far as design whether typography or graphic goes Sociological Science charges somewhere around $2,000 per article to authors and it looks just fine.
Source?
(I have no knowledge about whether this claim is accurate.)
the authors of this study detail at least potential reason for the tendency of high-impact (i.e. widely cited) journals and studies to have lower reproducibility rates: major journals tend to prefer publishing "innovative" studies w/ results that have the potential to push the envelope and advance the state of the art. as a result of this position on the extreme cutting edge, though, those kinds of studies are less likely to have really solid results. at the same time, though, they're more likely to inspire attempts to respond to them in one way or another -- leading to more citations.
they note that this emphasis by high-profile journals results in a disincentive to put in the time to do the less glamorous work of reproducing other teams' studies, which is a potentially major issue for the trajectory of science as a whole.
Science and Nature ... like publishing groundbreaking research, research with surprising outcomes, etc. These categories of findings are more likely a priori to be false, so it's not surprising even with a positive story they are less likely to replicate than a perfectly pedestrian study with an unsurprising finding.
Same with publishing templates. The science community itself provides the style guides and style templates. The publishers provide printing presses. That’s it.
The scientific community can decide to abandon the publishers, and start competing journals, which will automatically transfer the heft away from the original and to the upstart, because it is the community that provides the value.
This may sound idealistic, but this has already happened. The linguistics community abandoned Elsevier’s Lingua and replaced it overnight with Glossa. The linguistic community’s success, then inspired the mathematics community to abandon Springer’s Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics and replace it with Algebraic Combinatorics.
This path is traveled. The pattern established. In 2019 it’s just much easier to start a publication since you need very little economic capital.
(Disclosure: I'm part of a project that aims to facilitate that.)
These papers are self edited and peer reviewed in public. I don't see much difference from when CS papers where in journals
(Though full disclosure: I'm part of a project that aims to help identify the best preprints, so it's somewhat my thing.)
I m sorry their standards can be crazy nitpicky and huge time wasters. Some uniformity is desireable, but their guidelines span tens of pages.
He refused their plea bargain and committed suicide not too long after.
I hope the situation here is different enough that she will have a better time than he did.
Cannot stand it.