There do seem to be some strong arguments in favour of having a cause prioritisation journal. I think there are some reasons against too though, which you don’t mention:
For work people are happy to do in sufficient detail and depth to publish, there are significant downsides to publishing in a new and unknown journal. It will get much less readership and engagement, as well as generally less prestige. That means if this journal is pulling in pieces which could have been published elsewhere, it will be decreasing the engagement the ideas get from other academics who might have had lots of useful comments, and will be decreasing the extent to which people in general know about and take the ideas seriously.
For early stage work, getting an article to the point of being publishable in a journal is a large amount of work. Simply from how people understand journal publishing to work, there’s a much higher bar for publishing than there is on a blog. So the benefits of having things looking more professional are actually quite expensive.
The actual work it is to set up and run a journal, and do so well enough to make sure that cause prioritisation as a field gains rather than loses credibility from it.
These are good points, and unless the area is well established so that initial publications come from bigger names (who will that way help to establish the journal), it’ll be hard to realize the idea.
What could be done at this point though is have an online page that collects/reports on all the publications relevant for cause prioritization, which may help with the growth of the field.
For work people are happy to do in sufficient detail and depth to publish, there are significant downsides to publishing in a new and unknown journal. It will get much less readership and engagement, as well as generally less prestige. That means if this journal is pulling in pieces which could have been published elsewhere, it will be decreasing the engagement the ideas get from other academics who might have had lots of useful comments, and will be decreasing the extent to which people in general know about and take the ideas seriously.
Yes. On the other hand, there has been relatively little publication on cause priorities anyway. I think most of the content here would be counterfactually unpublished.
For early stage work, getting an article to the point of being publishable in a journal is a large amount of work. Simply from how people understand journal publishing to work, there’s a much higher bar for publishing than there is on a blog. So the benefits of having things looking more professional are actually quite expensive.
Well some of this (though not all) adds value in terms of making the article more robust or more communicable. Also, a uniform format maybe helps keep people from being biased by the article’s appearance (probably a very small effect, however).
There do seem to be some strong arguments in favour of having a cause prioritisation journal. I think there are some reasons against too though, which you don’t mention:
For work people are happy to do in sufficient detail and depth to publish, there are significant downsides to publishing in a new and unknown journal. It will get much less readership and engagement, as well as generally less prestige. That means if this journal is pulling in pieces which could have been published elsewhere, it will be decreasing the engagement the ideas get from other academics who might have had lots of useful comments, and will be decreasing the extent to which people in general know about and take the ideas seriously.
For early stage work, getting an article to the point of being publishable in a journal is a large amount of work. Simply from how people understand journal publishing to work, there’s a much higher bar for publishing than there is on a blog. So the benefits of having things looking more professional are actually quite expensive.
The actual work it is to set up and run a journal, and do so well enough to make sure that cause prioritisation as a field gains rather than loses credibility from it.
These are good points, and unless the area is well established so that initial publications come from bigger names (who will that way help to establish the journal), it’ll be hard to realize the idea.
What could be done at this point though is have an online page that collects/reports on all the publications relevant for cause prioritization, which may help with the growth of the field.
Yes. On the other hand, there has been relatively little publication on cause priorities anyway. I think most of the content here would be counterfactually unpublished.
Well some of this (though not all) adds value in terms of making the article more robust or more communicable. Also, a uniform format maybe helps keep people from being biased by the article’s appearance (probably a very small effect, however).