Can blog posts be better than journal articles?

If you make an error in a journal article, and realise it after the event, no one will ever know unless they write to you and you tell them. The mechanics of it all are just too difficult. A couple of journals I am familiar with do add ‘errata’ to the next issue or even to later issues, but even in these cases the errata are slips added between the pages, not part of the published journal itself. If I make an error here and somebody points it out, I can correct it, and leave a comment myself to thank the alert reader. Sometimes too much is happening and I forget to do so, but in general, errors on blog posts can be fixed at once. Both Anthony Watts and Judith Curry do this as a matter of course. It follows, says Lakens, that blog posts are likely to be more error-free than journal articles.

Lakens says: … I would consider my blogs more error-free, and of higher quality. There are some reasons why you can not just update scientific articles (we need a stable scientific record), and there might be arguments for better and more transparent version control of blog posts, but for the consumer, it’s just very convenient that mistakes can easily be fixed in blogs, and that you will always read the best version.

5. Blogs are Open Access (and might be read more)

Blogs are read, and are accessible, says Lakens, and most journal articles are not. Getting figures about all this is difficult, as he points out. I would agree with him on that. This website has a pretty consistent amount of traffic. Most of these essays are read about a thousand times in the first four weeks, and keep being read, though in much smaller numbers, for a year or more after that. I’ve lost count of how many unique individuals have visited here in the five years since it started, but it must be approaching 70,000. I doubt that I would have many more readers if I were writing in the local newspaper. And the great advantage is that commenters are quick to comment, and others to discuss. That is not the case much with newspapers and hardy at all in academic journals.

I’ll let Lakens finish, for I generally agree with him.

First, It is my opinion that blogs, on average, score better on some core scientific values, such as open data and code, transparency of the peer review process, egalitarianism, error correction, and open access. 

And, I am not recommending we stop publishing in journals, but I want to challenge the idea that journal publications are the gold standard of scientific output. They fall short on some important dimensions of scientific quality, where they are outperformed by blog posts. Pointing this out might inspire some journals to improve their current standards.