Nature Publisher Launches PLoS ONE Competitor

linhares writes "Nature's Publishing Group is launching a new journal, Scientific Reports, announced earlier this month. The press release makes it clear that it is molded after PLoS ONE: 'Scientific Reports will publish original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences. It will not set a threshold of perceived importance for the papers that it publishes; rather, Scientific Reports will publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original. To enable the community to evaluate the importance of papers post-peer review, the Scientific Reports website will include most-downloaded, most-emailed, and most-blogged lists. All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication, and will be deposited in PubMed Central.' Perhaps readers may find it ironic that PLoS ONE, first dismissed by Nature as an 'online database' 'relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals' seems to be setting the standards for 'a new era in publishing.'"

Comments

Wait and See

[JanneM]

It being Nature group is no guarantee of success or high impact. And we have no idea if they are in it for the long haul or if they'll bail in a few years if the uptake is low. I'd just wait a couple of years and see what happens to it before submitting a paper there. Meanwhile, PLoS has a good impact factor, large readership and doesn't have a limit on the number of accepted papers so that's a better option for now.

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

Oldtimers gonna love PLoS' response: http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2011/01/welcome-nature-seriously-2/

Re:Wait and See

[linhares]

Another problem that lots of people have brought up is the CC non commercial license that Nature is using. This could hamper the Open Access movement (and an author's ultimate impact). Some people go as far as to claim that non-commercial licenses aren't Open Access at all and can indeed hinder progress down the line. At any rate, ONE has at least three years until Nature gets its report card (=impact factor). PLoS ONE is already the largest journal in the world (by volume), and if it can maintain quality, the Public Lib of Science should be safely sustainable in the long run. But make no mistake, Nature is coming here with guns blazing.

Re:Wait and See

[the gnat]

Another problem that lots of people have brought up is the CC non commercial license that Nature is using.

Whoa, I just read through the license terms - what do these actually mean? It is unclear to me whether the license only covers the text itself, or the scientific results described in the text. In other words, if I work at a private biotech company, and someone publishes a new and interesting technique relevant to my current research, am I not allowed to download the paper and apply it to my work? Or am I simply not allowed to redistribute the paper? The phrases "commercial exploitation" and "commercial use is not permitted" do not make this clear. I honestly do not care whether the license terms prohibit (for instance) making derivative works from the paper text, or re-publishing it in a book, etc.; I have zero patience for FSF-style ideological crusades. As a (government-funded) scientist, I simply want everyone to be able to read the paper and use the results in their own work (for-profit or not) without paying an extortionate per-article fee to Nature.

If someone with more of a clue could clarify, please chime in.

Re:YAY !! WE ARE ROLLING NOW !!

[interkin3tic]

To the end of "Readers decide what research is the most relevant and important" rather than editors. "This is good science but we think it just isn't interesting to enough people, so we aren't going to publish it and you'll have to publish it in a lower tier journal" is a less than ideal situation, especially when which journals you publish in makes a difference on your CV. ... or am I responding to a nonsense, off topic post?

Re:YAY !! WE ARE ROLLING NOW !!

[PopeRatzo]

To what end, I ask, to what end?

Maybe now we can end the awful hegemony of the so-called "scientists" who would try to use their so-called "data" to show that God did not in fact create the world in 6 days or that the burning of fossil fuels (preferably drilled from beneath so-called "wildlife refuges") is not in fact excellent for the environment.

Up Next? Null Findings Journal

[Palmsie]

It seems journal editors have finally entered the technological age. Congrats. A similar idea they have yep to adopt (at least in social science) is a journal for null findings. The closet drawer problem still hasn't gone away.
http://www.skepdic.com/filedrawer.html

Re:Up Next? Null Findings Journal

[interkin3tic]

I don't think having a publication in which to submit those results is going to change much though. For one thing, no one wants to be the guy who expected one thing, got a few results to the contrary, published that negative result, and then it was later proven that result was wrong and the researcher was right initially. Especially when it can negatively impact your results. "We have this grand model, and we may have disproven part of it."

Moreover, the number of controls you're willing to do to ensure your negative result is true is usually about half the number of controls you'd be willing to do to prove your positive result is true. The number of controls you NEED to do to ensure your negative result is real is often double the amount of controls you'd need to do to prove a positive result.

Lastly, negative results are often one small part of what would be a larger story. That larger story might be interesting, and negative results can definitely lead you to new interesting theories, and those do get published, but publishing single negative results often are useless.

I just got a negative result last week. It's an RNAi experiment, I attempted to reduce the amount of one gene in a cell type, hoping to see a specific change in that cell's behavior that would back up my model for what's going on in that cell. I didn't see that change (phenotype). Testing whether or not I'm successfully knocking down the gene is much more difficult compared to observing the phenotype. One explanation is that I didn't actually successfully reduce that gene, so I'm trying again and hopefully will see the phenotype. If that doesn't work, it may be that I was knocking the gene down, but the gene is not involved in that cell behavior. That would be mildly interesting to me, but very few other people are expecting that gene to be involved in that process, if anyone else is, and I'm not interested in spending several hundred dollars just to show that uninteresting result.

This does leave me open to the possibility that I wasn't successful in knocking down the gene either time but it is involved in the process. I'll have to determine then whether or not we have the money and time to spend on potentially nothing.

If we do the test and see that we are knocking down the gene and still not getting the phenotype, one could still ask whether or not there's residual amounts of that gene floating around. Testing that would be even more difficult and expensive. There's no way we're doing that test, but unless we were to do the test, we couldn't say "this gene is not involved in this process." And again, even then, no one would care about that result.

Sorry Nature

[blind biker]

...but fuck you. Will you make your oldest articles available for download? I still can't get over that 1928 article on capillary effect that is STILL BEHIND A PAYWALL! Nature embodies all that is wrong with scientific journals. Not the worst, but definitely emblematic.

Re:Sorry Nature

[digitalderbs]

it's worse. This systems appears to require a $1350 "Article Processing Charge" for the authors. Talk about milking it.

What about PNAS

[DriedClexler]

I thought PNAS was stupid because it looks like you're supposed to pronounce it P-NAS, which sounds like "penis", but no one listened to my warning.

Re:No mention of arxiv.org yet?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

ArXiv is not an open-access journal. The phrase "open-access journal" has a very specific meaning, and using arXiv as an example of such does nothing but muddy the waters. Specifically, putting an article up on it doesn't really count as publishing -- you don't put "deposited on arXiv" on your CV. Open-access journals such as those published by PLoS and BMC have the same editorial and peer-review standards as traditional journals (higher standards, in many cases) and their success has scared the hell out of a lot of the traditional journal publishers, who are now scrambling to catch up.

Note that this isn't intended to sell arXiv short. It's a wonderful service, and I'm glad to see it expanding into many different fields. But it's important to keep the terminology straight. Groups like PRISM are already pushing the "open acess = no peer review" meme; don't play their game.

I'll take the past, please...

[Garwulf]

If this is the future of academic journal publishing, I'll take the past, please. I don't mind accessibility, and I don't mind creative commons, but I do mind it when the journal reaches a point of being a parasite. I'm talking about author fees.

As far as I know, most journals pay for their publications via subscriptions from university libraries. They don't do it using a vanity press model, where they take money from the authors for publication. Both of the online journals mentioned here - PLoS and Scientific Reports, are charging scientists over a thousand dollars for publication.

I'm sorry, but speaking as an author, a researcher (who has co-written a peer reviewed journal article waiting for publication in a Classics journal), and a publisher, this is just wrong. It's taking advantage of academics who are desperate to publish in a "publish or perish" environment, and relieving them of their money. And, because the journal article authors are paying for publication, it will likely carry a taint that may undermine the legitimacy of any peer review the article passed.

Frankly, if this sort of parasitic business model is the projected future of academic publishing, I think it's best if it's skipped. The old model was better.

Re:No mention of arxiv.org yet?

[Z8]

YourI take your point that arXiv.org is not peer reviewed and the PLoS journal are. However, arXiv.org is definitely "open access". Besides obviously meeting the definition, even their web page advertises it as open access. Also, not all journals are peer-reviewed.

Maybe you are arguing that "open access journal" means something different than "open access"+"journal", but who is muddying the waters at that point? It's easier just to say that arXiv.org is not peer-reviewed while some other open access sites are.

PRISM may be wrong that open access = no peer review, but it's also a mistake to assume open access = peer review. Open access and peer review are just two different things.

Re:No mention of arxiv.org yet?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Of course arXiv is open-access, but only in the same sense as everything on the internet that isn't deliberately locked up. And in terms of academic publishing, "journal" pretty much implies "peer-reviewed" -- while it is true that not every journal is peer-reviewed, those that aren't peer-reviewed really aren't a meaningful part of the discussion. In short, arXiv isn't a journal at all (by any definition) and I don't think anyone involved with it would claim that it is. OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me at all if PRISM et al. would like people to think that it is, because that would be very useful for the anti-open-access-publishing propaganda campaign.