The papers are the important thing. What do journal titles add?

1. Access to a peer review service. We could organise that outside the context of established journals.

2. Knowledge that there has been reputable peer review. We could deal with that problem by publishing the names of reviewers. I know that’s not traditional, but I don’t see the problem. We are happy to be named in criticisms of other people’s papers after their publication, when we write papers demolishing other people’s arguments.

Why do 1. and 2. matter?

A. They give some quality control over the allocation of taxpayers’ money that takes place when it is decided who gets a job. It helps to have published in the right journals. But reports from named referees could do just as well.

B. They direct our attention to what we really must read in order to keep up. Read the top journals, and you’re probably OK. But an informal rumour mill (“Have you seen X’s great new paper?”) could do that job. Most things would get looked at by someone, and once two or three people you respected had told you about X’s great new paper, you would go and read it. Come to think of it, one could set up an Internet-based voting system, and viewers could decide whose votes they wanted to be taken into account in generating recommendations for them.

(disclaimer: I’m not involved in any sort of academic work, just an interested bystander)

I’m glad to learn it and am sorry for spreading falsehoods.

There’s a remarkably cool open access journal here:
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal
[Interest to declare – I’ve reviewed for it and published in it]

The directory of open access journals is here:
http://www.doaj.org/
4000+

Elsevier journals are prominent in agricultural & ecological sciences, and in a milieu driven by impact factors it would be hard to get away from them as an individual; a clear majority of my peer-reviewed work would have been published by Elsevier.

There is no direct succession from the 17th C. Elzevir family and the decreasingly relevant Reed Elsevier publishing group.

Wikipedia: “The family ceased printing in 1712, but a contemporary publisher Elsevier takes its name from this early modern business.”

Wikipedia calls them “weasel words”; I think that’s just as good a term as any. And much more honest than “passive formulations” which seems to be a way of criticising someone without actually out-and-out being critical. In fact, I’d say that “passive formulation” is a passive formulation for “weasel words”.