The point is this. I do the science of information flow in science and “aggregator” seems like the most accurate description of one of the journals’ two central roles. People send in their articles and the journal compiles them and publishes the aggregate, for the convenience of the community. If you have a better word to describe this pattern I would like to hear it. (The other role, which I acknowledged early on, is filtering the input to pick the best.)

The aggregation function is quite interesting because it is an example of self-organization in a distributed system. That is, the journal does not go out and collect the articles, rather the distributed agents decide when, and to whom, to send them.

There is nothing in this many-one mapping to suggest that there is no room for competition, or that journals are perfect maps of communities, whatever that might mean. Nor is Nature a good example because its target community is the whole of science. Most journals serve small communities.

But the important point is that I see no “filter failure,” or any other reason for the journals to change, in what you say. But then, as I said in the beginning, you are arguing from a metaphor. I prefer a scientifically accurate description. As far as I can see all the new media support the journals, by acting like word of mouth advertising. Blogs, listservs and conferences are not alternatives to journals. In fact they make journals more important. Nor are they filters, if anything they are amplifiers, metaphorically speaking.

Of course Nature is meant to give a wide-angle view of science, but even highly focused journals give me that same weird optical effect – like I’m at an optician’s and he’s putting different lenses in to test my eyes, and I stare at the same thing but see something different.

That was probably not helpful, but I agree, my filtration system is complex and not really well mapped to any particular journal.

Yes, I did extend your point to illustrate how it breaks down — logically, if there is a 1:1 correlation between Journal and Community, then each community would only need one journal, which is I think a fair extension of your aggregation metaphor. But, as you say, if journals compete for a community’s output, if they were aggregators, they’d take it all. But journals reject the majority of what they receive, so instead they filter. Aggregators don’t reject, they collect. That’s why I think your metaphor is wrong.

The journal’s filtration function is warped by the presence and functions of network filters. I try to explain all that in the post. To respond to those changes effectively and adopt functions that fit the new filters, journals must change, or accept the faster, recursive filters as a fact of life and all the changes they portend. As you note, all the other filters entering the network are needed (blogs, listservs, conferences, etc.), but you’re just agreeing with me. These filters add information to things they cover, so they’re different filters than the ones we think of when we think of journals — they don’t reduce the amount of information by filtering, but increase the amount of information by filtering it. Hence, Shirky’s “filter failure” becomes untenable, since filter success in the networked world leads to increased information overload.

That “nothing else would be needed” is not my claim; you have made that up. For one thing, in many cases several journals compete for the community output. Then too there are community portals, blogs, listservs, conferences, etc., all of which are useful, hence needed. The network has become quite complex, but the journal’s function remains intact.

It is not a “fact” that journals are aggregators, any more than it’s a “fact” that journals are filters. Both are metaphorical constructs. If it were a “fact” that Journal A is an aggregator for Community A, then every article in Journal A would be relevant to Community A and nothing else would be needed for Community A. Since this is clearly not the case, you can’t state it’s a fact. I think it’s just your way of thinking about it. Sorry. Everything you say just makes that all the more apparent.

Metaphors are how we think, even if we’re unaware of them (in fact, that’s part of their power — we barely realize it). My rhetorical point is that metaphors are untrue statements that are not lies — for example, “a heart of stone” doesn’t mean that the heart is literally made of igneous rock, but is cold and unfeeling. You compare journals to aggregators. I’d argue that’s your metaphor for journals (so, yes, you do think in metaphors to understand something, as you’ve illustrated twice now), but “journal as aggregator” is one that’s not widely shared. To me, aggregators collect journal outputs. So, I think your metaphor is wrong.

I also think the metaphor of the filter is wrong . . . now. Network connectivity has changed this, as I’ve tried to explore in this post. What will it mean to editors? I think it means that publishing more of what you receive makes sense. If authority in the network space is shared, why share it? Is the model of the multi-title publisher going to make even more sense?