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Nobel Winner Schekman Boycotts Journals For 'Branding Tyranny'
An anonymous reader writes "One of this year's winners of the Nobel Peace prize has declared a boycott on leading academic journals after he accused them of contributing to the 'disfigurement' of science. Randy Schekman, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, said he would no longer contribute papers or research to the prestigious journals, Nature, Cell and Science, and called for other scientists to fight the 'tyranny' of the publications." And if you'd rather not listen to the sound of auto-playing ads, you'll find Schekman's manifesto at The Guardian.
I suspect most academics and researchers at this point are fed up with the way journals work, I have yet to hear one of them actually praise the current system of publication. I am not sure how it could be restructured, but what is happening today is retarding research and frustrating a lot of good people who would rather just be doing what they are supposed to be doing, teaching and research.
This is just a symptom of college and university boards wanting to attract attention to their institutions, which pushes tenure-track professors and researchers into 'flashier' research to help their cause to get tenure, which then drives what gets submitted to journals.
Either make tenure easier to get so that professors are less likely to pursue fad or headline-grabbing science in order to achieve it, or encourage more grants to scientists that aren't affiliated with particular schools, so that they don't have to dance for their boards...
Unfortunately most major companies aren't conducting basic research like IBM, Xerox, Bell, and other big organizations did fifty+ years ago, so getting grants from big entities is harder than it once was.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So many people call every Nobel prize the Peace Prize.
I don't know why I need to point this out, but the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine are not the same thing. Schekman has only won the latter, not the former.
In evidence based medicine, the paper rules; in papers publishing the publisher rules; who rule the publisher...rules.
Did anybody else read this headline too quickly, and picture a crossdresser running around with a cattleprod?
a way to fix this by his own term is to stop contributing ... bravo ??? Shouldn't he contribute more instead...that would be better instead of the "fuck it, I quit" attitude
Obviously it's easy for someone in his position to take this stance (it would be suicide for most early career scientists), but it's still laudable. I've seen instances of this go the other way: Nobel appears and the person turns it into a licence to publish craptacular papers in top tier journals. When this happens it's bad on every level: harms the field, harms the first author, harms the journal.
soylentnews.org
I have sympathy for Shekman's argument, but it's the same story throughout publishing, not just for science. Publishers build their reputation on brilliant authors, but I don't know a single publisher that only publishes brilliant books/journals. Where his argument wobbles for me is when he mentions elife as being free to view but sponsored by industry. How will he and his sponsors measure success of that venture? The cynic in me suggests that as well as readership figures and brilliance of content, reputation will form a part. It may be softer than the Nature approach, but perhaps that just means it isn't as successful yet.
Well, I can't tell whether your a chatterbot or schizophrenic, so I guess you just passed a test for the first time in your life.
Not only are many (most?) academics fed up with the big journals, we are also generally fed up with publication pressure. Our school is just now going through a review. The accreditation people want number of publication. It doesn't matter what you wrote about, or whether you had anything useful to say, it's just numbers.
Who read about the University of Edinburgh physicist: He just won the Nobel prize, and has published a total of 10 papers in his entire career. As he said: today he wouldn't even get a job.
I understand that school administrations want some way to measure faculty performance. But just as student reviews are a dumb way to assess teaching quality (because demanding teachers may be rated as poorly as incompetent teachers), number of publications is a dumb way to assess research quality.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Journals are only partially to blame for dysfunction of scientific publishing. By far the most harmful actor is pressure to publish papers regardless of quality and sometimes even fraudulently.
"Publish or perish" is a unique pressure on mid-career academics to churn out publications. It is administrative metric that when applied can lead to career-ending outcomes for academics that are deemed "unproductive" This highly arbitrary metric looks at a number of papers published and sometimes journal impact factor, but it fails to measure scientific contribution to the field. Application of this metric linked to all kinds of scientific misconduct - from correlation fishing expeditions, to questionable practices in formulating research questions, to outright 'data cooking' and fraud.
From the TFA:
"I have now committed my lab to avoiding luxury journals"
This is bad news for his students and postdocs who wish to get a job in the future. Publishing in a 'luxury' journal is almost a requirement for getting a permanent position in scientific research. However much I may agree with his point of view, he also has a responsibility to advance the careers of the promising students and postdocs in his group.
Nobel editorial prize.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I worked closely with senior academics for many years and got to know university culture very well. It sucks. I pray I never have to work in that fucked environment ever again. By comparison, working for private sector industry is awesome. My income *doubled* for less work. Now I get treated like a professional instead of a child.
The way it should be is that the metrics for performance are the aggregate quality and impact of the work, not the number of publications or the impact factors of the journals they go into. Why doesn't this work? Because administrators generally don't understand the science that they are "administering." A possible solution would be to make sure that the people running the show behind the scenes are knowledgeable and competent, but we all know that's never going to happen...
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
I preferred him in the Ghostbusters movies.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Pretty much every physics paper is pre-submitted to arXiv and after it is published in a paper the final copy is again resubmitted. The arXiv archive is there for peer review too, so it goes through two rounds of peer review. This has been the case for a decade now, I don't understand why this hasn't been taken up by other fields by now.
IAAPGS
FWIW, while Cell and Nature are both owned by private companies, Science is run by a non-profit (the American Association for the Advancement of Science), and articles in science are made freely available two years after publication.
Having read his manifesto, I don't think his issue with with corporate publishers per se. His issue is with the culture of judging the quality of work by the prestige of the journal it was published in. That allows journals to further exploit the process; they have a large incentive to publish flashy research rather than quality research, because flashy research gets more citations -- thus making the journal more prestigious.
While I agree this is a flawed system, I'm not convinced that open-access journals are the solution; there are already more prestigious open access journals -- like Physical Review X and the New Journal of Physics (both of which are run by non-profits with prestigious, closed-access journals).
To some extent, you need both flash and quality research. I'm sure someone could do quality research on the physics of navel lint trapping, but pretty much no one would care; the research isn't interesting, and it wouldn't be worth the effort to peer review. So, for better or worse, I don't think the flashy factor will or should totally go away, although I agree it should be reduced.
That said, I am a fan of open-access journals, but I need something to publish first. I guess I should get back to research and stop wasting time with Slashdot posts....
Shouldn't that be "Peace Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for Medicine and Physiology"
It's not an issue of early-career vs established scientists -- it's an issue of pedigreed vs. self-made scientists.
Sheckman is saying that he won't support a student's desire to submit a paper to SNC. His students will still have the benefit of being associated with a Nobel Prize winner. I see this as a sort of unilateral disarmament from someone whose influence is assured. Sheckman and his people have already been noticed, so he's letting everyone else have a chance at getting noticed too (by publishing in SNC). That may not be his exact intent, but it will be the short-term consequence if other big shots follow his lead.
In my field (electrochemistry) the last 5/10 years caused a great deal of researchers to move away from the "traditional" journals (Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Solid State Letters, Electrochimica Acta) to the flashier, more general publications (ACS and RSC publications, mostly). These journals are more widely read, so their impact factor is much higher. But most of their content is also mostly irrelevant, and since the public reading them is not a real expert in my field, what is important is to show pretty pictures, more than actually advancing the research.
I am lucky enough to do real research in industry, so that IF are not superimportant, but I feel that most journals have a very low signal/noise ratio and it's increasingly difficult finding relevant papers, after scratching a little under the surface of the claims made in the abstracts.
Articles are submitted anonymously to a central site. Perhaps rough statistics on the author's past work can be included but nothing more. Each paper sits there for a fixed time period, maybe 3 or 4 weeks. Editors scour the site and bid for which papers they want to put through peer review at their journal. The community can assign ratings (1 to 10 stars in 2 or 3 different categories) to papers to help guide editors. At the end of the 3 or 4 weeks, the authors choose which journal of the ones which applied should get their submission. Journal sends paper to reviewers. Reviewers know which journal sent them the paper but obviously don't know the author names. Reviewers aren't allowed to reject a paper due to it being not novel (the journal already made that value judgement). The reviewers can only make objective scientific critiques. If it fails to get in, authors can send their paper and (optionally) reviews to the next journal on the list. That journal is not allowed to ask for new reviewers if the authors have already supplied reviews and addressed criticisms. Adding too many reviewers invariably results in unrealistic demands on authors. The final anonymous reviews are available as supplemental info following publication; this may decrease the incidence of shitty, biased, reviews.
So this is somewhat like arXiv, but papers not accepted get pulled down (they can be resubmitted) and it's intended to be a gateway to publication.
soylentnews.org
Who are the editors at these journals? They're largely former researchers from popular academic research groups.
Who are the government program managers looking at journal statistics to judge research quality? They're largely former researchers from popular academic groups.
Who are the university administrators creating the publish or perish environment? They're largely former researchers from popular academic groups.
These relationships are the defining characteristic of modern scientific research. Despite the heartache and frustration the system causes, it also produces a huge amount of value for the rest of us.
Over the last 30 years, the commercial labs, defense contractors and government facilities have all become subordinate to university R&D. This has combined the metrics university research has traditionally used with the competition of the private sector. If we want to change things, we need to change the basic structure of how we do research again.
We didn't like using private funding as a success metric. Now we don't like using citations as a success metric. Ok, what else can we use?
The ultimate responsibility for this and a slew of related problems in academia lies with the departments themselves. They have chosen to outsource the task of evaluating their members work. Rather than reading and understanding their colleagues output, they rely on a collection of bureacratic measures such as citation counts/journal prestige and so forth. The only real question is whether they do so solely out of laziness or if the problem of evaluating work is too difficult for them to address.
It must be an attempt to one-up the King James Programming Markov chain.
I don't have statistics on this, but resubmitting after peer review is the standard way of doing things in my field (cosmology). That doesn't mean submitting the version that appears in the actual journal, with its formatting etc, but the version that passed the peer review, with all the reviewer's comments addressed.
As supporting evidence, here is the license of one of the most heavily used pieces of software in my field, camb:
You are licensed to use this software free of charge on condition that:
Any publication using results of the code must be submitted to arXiv at the same time as, or before, submitting to a journal. arXiv must be updated with a version equivalent to that accepted by the journal on journal acceptance.
If you identify any bugs you report them as soon as confirmed
Journals would not be in a position to try to fight this - nobody reads the journals, and everybody reads arXiv, so an attempt to prevent this would blow up in their face.