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."
To whom? It's not exactly a design decision, regardless of who your backers are.
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.....
Anonymity is an important part of the peer review process, else everybody would be too busy worrying about their reputations and careers to be honest.
Honesty is apparently a small part of those reputations then.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
nothing "top tier" ever gets announced. Something becomes top tier because it proofs itself to be top tier.
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.