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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.
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.
He does continue to keep contributing --- to online, open-access journals without the adverse motivations of the "luxury brand" publishers. This way, alternative journals get to build the reputation of attracting top scientists and publishing good-enough-for-a-Nobel-prize-winner research, which can help change the perceptions that make publication in the "luxury brand" journals necessary for scientific careers.
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.
You mean Peter Higgs?
soylentnews.org
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
Schekman is the editor-in-chief of eLife, a new open-access biomedical journal (so it's a bit personal for him - not that I disagree with his message). Previously he was the editor of PNAS, one of the better publications by non-profit publishers.
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.
Commercial interests have nothing to do with this (at least, they are far removed).
Most biology research is funded by the federal government, and grant funding rates have gotten very low (meaning that it is very competitive and reviewers are looking for shortcuts).
Likewise, the big research universities (the most prestigious jobs) are non-profit, or even state run... and they evaluate their faculty in large part on their ability to get grant funding.
While journals are not perfect, they do (usually) maintain some minimum bars and filters for the material that goes into them.
"Journals published by Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Sage all accepted my bogus paper."
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Have you aver heard of H-index. It combines rate and impact (measured by number of citations) in a way that also de-emphasizes one off flukes. I actually tend to compare H-index per year, which is a useful measure of contribution rate. But, that said, there are massive variations between even sub-fields in the same discipline due to different publishing and citation culture.