Journal extensions are not good for science

by Martin Monperrus

In academia, the big business is about publishing papers. There are different kinds of papers: conference papers, journal articles, technical reports, monographs.

Those kinds of papers are part of various academic social contracts:

In some disciplines, there is a practice called “journal extension”. Authors can re-publish a work that has already been published in a conference, later, in a journal. One practice is that the extension should contain some new material, e.g. one third of new content. These journal extensions exist for good, bad and ugly reasons. Let’s list the good reasons first:

Now the bad reasons:

And finally the hugly reasons:

Beyond that, the practice of journal extensions has many side-effects:

For all these reasons, I think we should avoid making journal extensions, in order to all focus on writing high-quality novel papers in the first place.

Naturally, the natural consequence is to setup journals that do not contain journal extension papers, but only, fresh, novel, papers (aka “journal-first” papers).

Finally, science is a social process [2] and I am aware that the journal extension practice is well spread in the some communities, including mine. As such, getting rid of journal extensions is disruptive and it will not be easy to change.

What do you think?

--Martin Monperrus

Stockholm, Jan 24 2019

[1] Conference Paper Selectivity and Impact (CACM)

[2] Social processes and proofs of theorems and programs

Credits: Thanks to Denys Poshyvanyk and Robert Feldt for insightful remarks

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