The internet has democratized academic publishing

It's really hard to get a paper published in a top-tier scientific journal. The journal Science, for example, currently accepts only 7 percent of articles it receives. That means it's harder to get published there than to be accepted as an undergrad to Princeton or MIT.

But a recent study, published in the online journal arXiv.org, concluded that getting a paper published in an elite journal matters less today than it did in the 1990s. While that's good for giving people more access to information, there's no guarantee that this information is accurate or worthwhile.

Top-tier journals have been prioritizing some studies over others since the late 1800s. In the past, only elite journals had enough money for wide print distribution. Articles in those journals were significantly more likely to be read and cited because they were physically in university libraries for researchers and students to access.

The internet has upended the status quo. People searching particular topics in databases such as Google Scholar or PubMed see results based on their relevance first and their chronology second, with much less attention paid to where exactly the study was published.

As a result, the metrics for what defines a "successful" journal article have changed. It's no longer about the circulation of a journal; statistics about the number of times an article has been cited, "are widely available to all users without a subscription – which makes it easier for both researchers and those considering their resumes to view these metrics," the authors write. Finally, a study's metrics can reflect a study's true impact regardless of where it was published.

To assess how much of a difference the internet has made in research, the authors looked at studies published in elite journals (the top ten, like Nature and Science) and non-elite journals between 1995 and 2013.

In that period, they found that the number of most-cited papers published in non-elite journals had increased by 64 percent. In addition, the percent of citations to all articles published in non-elite journals during this period increased from 27 to 47 percent. This means that both individual articles and the non-elite journals themselves are getting more traction in the scientific community.

But the news might not all be good. Some of the non-elite journals are open access journals, which are notoriously lax when it comes to evaluating the science behind the articles they publish. So, unless you're a scientist with an eye trained to call bullshit on bad studies, it's hard to separate the good stuff from the riffraff (or, worse, the studies that are pure fantasy).

Researchers who publish good studies have now joined the ranks of the metric-obsessed, which means that necessary science sometimes doesn't get done because its headline won't be sexy enough or an idea isn't certain to work.

All of this is inextricably tied to funding, so researchers have to be concerned about the metrics of their published works just to make sure they still have jobs. If a scientist comes out with an excellent study about a topic that's too obscure, publication in an elite journal may not ensure that her study gets the buzz it deserves.

Science journalists like me don't lament that the internet has given us more access to good science. Google Scholar and PubMed provide a seemingly endless wellspring of current and archival research for any discipline.

Take, for example, a study published recently in the journal Neuron, not an elite journal by this study's standards. The findings were riveting: researchers were able to manipulate mice's memories with powerful light. The methods were complicated to explain, but it was widely covered in the science media, even passing the powerful BS detectors at the KSJ Tracker. In this case, good research made it to popular media thanks to the internet.

But like a lot of information on the internet, being able to access that information doesn't mean that people can discern the worthwhile from the nonsensical. This democratization of information means that it's incumbent upon scientists, journalists, and hobbyists to be sure that they're disseminating research that is important and well conducted.