Slashdot Mirror
New Top Tier Science Journal Announced
Shipud writes "The Max Planck society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Wellcome Trust have announced their plans for a new journal for biomedical and life science research to be launched summer 2012. From the joint press release: 'The journal will employ an open and transparent peer review process in which papers will be accepted or rejected as rapidly as possible, generally with only one round of revisions, and with limited need for modifications or additional experiments. For transparency, reviewers' comments will be published anonymously.' The journal will be online-only and open access too, and they promise 'an opportunity to create a journal and article format that will exploit the potential of new technologies to allow for improved data presentation.' Especially valuable is the 'limited need for modifications or additional experiments,' especially since even Nature has recently published a scathing opinion piece about reviewers' almost reflexive demands for additional experiments from manuscript authors."
Paging Dr. Bob, paging Dr. Bob.
Please pick up the red courtesy phone...
...whether or not it's a "top tier" journal will surely depend on the quality of the submissions.
To whom? It's not exactly a design decision, regardless of who your backers are.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Open-access, online-only journal with anonymous commenting to be subverted by right wing evangelical Young Earth Creationists and global cooling supporters in 5.... 4.....
New and top tier, like the NBC "hit show of the summer" that hasn't even aired yet !! You people are pretty studpid !! Me, I'm getting ready for 2012 when nothing will matter anymore anyway !!
This would be an ideal time to rid ourselves of the plague of anonymous reviewers in science, a practice that is rife with abuse and self-interest.
Why not make the system truly open and publish reviews with the reviewers' names attached? If they're not willing to stand by their own words, they shouldn't be reviewing others' work in the first place.
For real transparency they should demand inclusion of all code and raw data used during the study. If reviewers can't reproduce (starting with only the appropriate COTS software) the numbers in the paper on their own machine, no publication.
"For transparency, reviewers' comments will be published anonymously."
Where is the "transparency" in this?
"Especially valuable is the 'limited need for modifications or additional experiments,' especially since even Nature has recently published a scathing opinion piece about reviewers' almost reflexive demands for additional experiments from manuscript authors."
Having worked in research labs I know for a fact that this is a strategy to delay publication by competitors. Reviewers most often do resaerch in the same fieled as the authors of the article and, while the reviewers are anonymous, the authors are not. What some reviewers do is, they assign a postdoc to work on the project while leveraging the data in the manuscript. Then they make sure the article will not be published any time soon by asking for more data and/or additional experiments to be performed. This strategy is even more efficient if the reviewers are "authorities" in their fields.
nothing "top tier" ever gets announced. Something becomes top tier because it proofs itself to be top tier.
it is instructive to remember that modern physics, in some sense, began with a postcard, a tweet if you will, of formula that effectively quantized energy. If ideas a put out there, and scientist take them with a grain of salt, we will see much advancement
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
How does one achieve instant 'top tier' status, anyhow. One would hope such regard would be earned.
On the other hand, if they publish enough anthropogenic global warming papers they'll be top shelf inside of six months.
I'm amazed we weren't expected to pay money to read the opinion piece at Nature.
A pound of Cold Fusion anyone?
Since my first ventures onto the Internet almost 15 years ago, I've thought that as the increased availability and specification of information on any given topic becomes more readily available, the position of argument from authority will become completely irrelevant. It's a nice fantasy to think that, in present day, any and all published research on Science, stemming from any particular discipline, is a level playing field. A place where the scientific method rings true and the merits of argument, data collection methodology, and referential updating are untouched by position and politic. Sadly, in my years on the net, supporting the very people puthing forth the very papers we're talking about, I've witnessed it first hand and know it to not be true.
If a truly nameless and faceless peer review outlet can be created for rigorous scientific argument without the need to humanize* the argument by the arguer, I can only hope that such an outlet should prosper and flourish in this information age. Pushing the progress of our understanding, and sharing the wealth of knowledge of our observed world much faster than it has been can only be a good thing in my book.
The last article talks about how difficult it is to get back reviewer's comments demanding additional work, and says that is a problem.
The thing is, I don't see "Nature" or other top-tier journals hurting for lack of submissions. If reviewers are being unreasonably critical, then why are people still submitting there? It's because they're willing to work hard to get a nature paper on their CV. Blaming top-tier journals for being choosy when researchers are willing to to go through it at any cost is a bit backwards.
In my opinion, the better approach would be for researchers to put less emphasis on top-tier publications. It's a piss-poor way of judging how good a researcher is. That has more to do with politics, funding, the number of people willing to work on your project, and ultimately luck than it does with hard work or good results. If you're working in a lab by yourself, doing the whole project by yourself, and publish valid results in a 3rd tier journal, that's a more impressive individual than if you had an army of people doing all the hard work, get stunning results, and publish in a first tier journal. I think that author dilution is under estimated.
It is of course simpler to say "Oh, that's a good journal, he must be a good scientist" than it is to judge that researcher's research as a whole, which is the only reason people do it.
The trouble is that publications are used as a metric by outside agencies to gauge productivity when assigning funding or offering new positions. It's simply not possible for everyone who is assessing applications to be knowledgeable enough about particular research fields to judge the merit of past publications individually so they fall back on impact factor.
It's well and good to decide to take the moral high road and make your contribution to moving science in a more open direction by only publishing in lower tier journals, but it hurts the careers of every author who doesn't already have tenure as well as the future grant prospects for your lab. I think that a move to a new publication system is necessary, but it's hard for individual scientists to move the process along. A journal with published reviewer comments is a good step in the right direction.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It's fine to judge individuals that way, but the days of being "an individual" in cutting edge science are long gone. These days you're part of a team. When you go looking for funding for big projects, agencies want to know how good your team is.
They can make the first cut at "which teams have published in Science or Nature recently" and still have more proposals than they need. Of course, that's a stupid way to make your first cut, and I think that behavior is the root of the problem.
Here ya go!
Thank you very much, please drive thru.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.