I’m currently in the process of trying to convert a preprint into a journal article (and another draft into a preprint), so this is very near-mode for me right now. Restricting my comments to points where I can add something over the other answers (or disagree with them):
1. I personally quite like 2-column PDFs. At the very least they are far preferable to 1-column PDFs. :-P
2. Yes, but a lot of it is pretty important work. I’m generally the plots guy in my collaborations, so a lot of the extra work is coming up with the best visualisations I can for the data, which is valuable. Though there is then a lot of extra extra work of making sure all the visualisations use consistent colour schemes / legends / layouts etc, which is slow and tedious.
3. This is extremely field specific. In mathematics authors generally go alphabetically. In biology the person who did most of the lab work generally goes first, the person who did most of the analysis (if there is one) generally goes second, the first author’s boss goes last, and everyone else goes in the middle. Sometimes you have awkward things where the first two or three authors get marked as “co-first-authors”, where they did roughly equal amounts but someone has to go first. And so forth. In many arts/humanities subjects almost all papers are single-author so they haven’t really worked this out yet. For most other fields I’m not familiar with the conventions.
5. My limited prior experience of peer-review has been frustratingly slow but otherwise broadly positive. Our paper was definitely better after peer review than it was before, and I expect this to be generally true and good. Stephan Guyenet had some recent comments on this that got linked by Slate Star Codex.
6. As others here have pointed out, I think it’s generally the other way around.
7. Contrary (or possibly just less diplomatically than?) to Richard_Kennaway, I think the situation here is exactly as terrible as you describe. I consider the major journal publishers to be parasites of the lowest order. But! This does not necessarily apply to the editors who work for those companies, many of whom do useful work.
8. How much preprints substitute for papers varies hugely by field. Physics is an outlier. In biology it’s becoming increasingly common but is still far from universal (but at least most of the important journals accept preprints). In other fields it’s much rarer, and in some fields the best journals won’t take your paper if you preprinted it first (though I think/hope this is dying out?).
10. Is “publishing” in this point supposed to be distinct from preprinting / publishing not-in-a-journal? Assuming it is, “allows future research to frictionlessly cite your findings” is increasingly a non-issue (preprints have DOIs and most journals let you cite them, at least in my field/s). On the other hand, here are two other useful roles served by publishing in journals.
Peer-review is pretty good. You need some kind of peer review, broadly defined. I think there are probably vastly better ways of doing it than the current system, but the current system is much better than what most places outside of academia have.
When you’re deep in the maw of Goodhart’s Law it’s easy to forget that the metrics everyone is now savagely gaming were originally good metrics. In the absence of another system (arXiv + karma?) for legibly aggregating expert opinion on the quality of academic work, a journal hierarchy does contain useful information. I have never (yet) published in Nature or Science, but my experience of personal encounters with those who have is that they are generally (certain sexy topics excluded) very impressive.
I’m currently in the process of trying to convert a preprint into a journal article (and another draft into a preprint), so this is very near-mode for me right now. Restricting my comments to points where I can add something over the other answers (or disagree with them):
1. I personally quite like 2-column PDFs. At the very least they are far preferable to 1-column PDFs. :-P
2. Yes, but a lot of it is pretty important work. I’m generally the plots guy in my collaborations, so a lot of the extra work is coming up with the best visualisations I can for the data, which is valuable. Though there is then a lot of extra extra work of making sure all the visualisations use consistent colour schemes / legends / layouts etc, which is slow and tedious.
3. This is extremely field specific. In mathematics authors generally go alphabetically. In biology the person who did most of the lab work generally goes first, the person who did most of the analysis (if there is one) generally goes second, the first author’s boss goes last, and everyone else goes in the middle. Sometimes you have awkward things where the first two or three authors get marked as “co-first-authors”, where they did roughly equal amounts but someone has to go first. And so forth. In many arts/humanities subjects almost all papers are single-author so they haven’t really worked this out yet. For most other fields I’m not familiar with the conventions.
5. My limited prior experience of peer-review has been frustratingly slow but otherwise broadly positive. Our paper was definitely better after peer review than it was before, and I expect this to be generally true and good. Stephan Guyenet had some recent comments on this that got linked by Slate Star Codex.
6. As others here have pointed out, I think it’s generally the other way around.
7. Contrary (or possibly just less diplomatically than?) to Richard_Kennaway, I think the situation here is exactly as terrible as you describe. I consider the major journal publishers to be parasites of the lowest order. But! This does not necessarily apply to the editors who work for those companies, many of whom do useful work.
8. How much preprints substitute for papers varies hugely by field. Physics is an outlier. In biology it’s becoming increasingly common but is still far from universal (but at least most of the important journals accept preprints). In other fields it’s much rarer, and in some fields the best journals won’t take your paper if you preprinted it first (though I think/hope this is dying out?).
10. Is “publishing” in this point supposed to be distinct from preprinting / publishing not-in-a-journal? Assuming it is, “allows future research to frictionlessly cite your findings” is increasingly a non-issue (preprints have DOIs and most journals let you cite them, at least in my field/s). On the other hand, here are two other useful roles served by publishing in journals.
Peer-review is pretty good. You need some kind of peer review, broadly defined. I think there are probably vastly better ways of doing it than the current system, but the current system is much better than what most places outside of academia have.
When you’re deep in the maw of Goodhart’s Law it’s easy to forget that the metrics everyone is now savagely gaming were originally good metrics. In the absence of another system (arXiv + karma?) for legibly aggregating expert opinion on the quality of academic work, a journal hierarchy does contain useful information. I have never (yet) published in Nature or Science, but my experience of personal encounters with those who have is that they are generally (certain sexy topics excluded) very impressive.