International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science
Submitted by Stuart Broz on Mon, 03/30/2009 - 8:20am
Earlier this month, the planned launch of the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science was announced. According to the website, "the journal will contain scientific papers, review articles and notes on a whole range of overlapping topics, food taste and flavour, culinary processes, global trends (lifestyles, healthy eating), nutrition, food service/management,…"
The journal will be published by Elsevier. This, unfortunately, means that the cost to access content in these journals will be high. Elsevier's institutional subscription prices run in the thousands of dollars per journal. Their subscriptions for individuals are more affordable, generally at about $200 - which is still more than most non-professionals can reasonably afford. They do offer PDF downloads, but at $31.50 per article...
Now, the material that will be in there might be worth it. I don't know. We haven't even seen who is on the editorial board. Still, I can't help but think that the scientific journal is becoming an increasingly outmoded medium. It was once a primary method of communication and information dissemination between members of an academic discipline. The Internet has changed that.
In food science, we have high-quality web sites and blogs that serve these purposes. What would an academic journal really add... other than exclusivity?
Comments
Elsevier is indeed evil --
Elsevier is indeed evil -- that is, they are for-profit and have a near-lock on the market, so they can squeeze institutions (and individuals) who want access to their content for as much as they can get.
The benefits of publishing your work in an academic journal as opposed to a web site or blog, however, can be considerable if you're an academic. I don't know if this is the case for the new journal, but most academic journals only publish content that has been through a few rounds of editing and revision -- and I don't mean proofreading or checking for typos. Reputable academic journals not only have editors who are experts in the field to select and critique articles, but they engage in a double-blind peer review process. That is, the editor identifies one or two other scholars in the field who work in the same area as the article's author but who are not close associates with the author to review the article. The reviewers don't know the author's identity and the author doesn't know the reviewer's. Very often this process leads to a substantially revised, better-written, and better argued article.
While a certain amount of peer review happens with websites and blogs, usually it happens after the fact, and the comments are relatively unmediated. There's no editor who knows the identity of both blogger and poster, and who can give the blogger a frame of reference for the comments (or, in the case of comments that don't provide substantive evaluation of the blog entry or webpage, elimiate the comment altogether).
Web sites and blogs are great publishing media in terms of timeliness and breadth of distribution and access, but they can't (in their current incarnations) replace academic journals as places of peer-evaluated, rigorous, well-thought-out scholarship. And in fields in which articles rather than books are the way professors earn tenure (this is the case in most of the sciences and in the social sciences -- it's actually only the humanities and possibly the fine arts that still require books for tenure), there has to be a way to ensure that the scholarship on which a professor is evaluated is of high quality. That's the service that academic journals (and university presses) provide.
Peer review
Rebecca,
I'm well aware of the process of publishing in academic journals. I don't, however, think that they have a monopoly on peer review - or even that peer review in the way that they practice it is the best model. Journals can be intensely political. I know in some disciplines that there are certain (perfectly valid) subjects that you will, simply, not get published in... and I don't even mean topics that are marginalized. In philosophy, for instance, there was a period of time (I don't know if it is over) where none of the major journals would publish anything seriously critical of W.V.O. Quine's work.
There has to be a better way. I'm not saying that blogging is the answer, but it does point in a new direction that bears exploring.
You raise a valid point about
You raise a valid point about the pitfalls of peer review, especially in journals. What I'm saying is don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, there has to be a better way -- and blogs may be the beginnings of that better way. (Actually, to me, the wiki is closer to a scholarly digital publishing model that could accomodate the best of peer review and have the added benefit of being updatable after publication.) But I also think that in scholarly communities there will always be problems of the nature you've mentioned -- alternate forms of publication might mitigate them in terms of information distribution, but I can also see a future in which certain blogs/wikis/etc. are considered "acceptable" for evaluation for tenure or promotion (or use in courses, or as sources for other scholarly works, etc.), and others aren't, and those decisions always have the potential to be political.
Ultimately, the reason that scholarly journals continue to exist is that academic communities value them. When a critical mass of those in academic communities see the value in alternate forms of electronic publishing (and this is certainly going to happen) then the information that's now appearing in scholarly journals will appear in those alternate forms. It won't necessarily be better in all things -- just different.
Seems like an awful lot to
Seems like an awful lot to pay...doubt I would, even for the pdf
MANGIA Y'ALL