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.

Comments

Contradiction

[kruach aum]

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.

Re:Journals are a symptom, not a cause

[femtobyte]

According to Schekman's argument, journals --- specifically the highest-impact-factor "luxury" journals --- do play a causal rather than merely symptomatic role in the process. Such journals court papers that are "flashy," which will get lots of citations and attention (thus lots of journal subscriptions), possibly because they are wrong and focused more on attention-getting controversial claims than scientific rigor. This provides feedback on the other side of the tenure-seeking "publish or perish" culture to shape what sort of articles the tenure-seeking professors are pressured to churn out. If a scientist wants to establish their reputation by publishing ground-breaking, exciting discoveries, there's nothing a-priori wrong with that; the failure comes when joined with impact-factor-seeking journals applying distorted lower standards for scientific rigor for "attention-getting" work (while rejecting solid but "boring" research papers).

Re:crossing fingers.

[jythie]

Though that touches on one of the other major problems, the one I would argue is bigger then the publishing one. Setting up labs with expertise is a nightmare since you are not allowed to have a 'war chest'. If you have a 6 month grant, a month gap, then a 6 month grant, you loose all your people between the two grants. Unless you are one of the tenured people who is immune to the gaps, working in university research is riskier then corporate, which causes a significant brain drain and leads to inferior research since keeping experienced people over time is difficult.

Slashdot wins Nobel

[oldhack]

Nobel editorial prize.

Re:crossing fingers.

[garutnivore]

As much as bloggers try to claim otherwise, publishing online has generally been a rather poor substitute for peer review and generally allows for a lot of really bad science to get wide attention.

What randoms unidentified bloggers think about publishing has no bearing whatsoever on what scientists think about scientific publishing. Publishing online does not necessitate that peer review be dispensed with. I've not ever met an academic, be it in the sciences or elsewhere, who ever argued that print peer-reviewed publications should be replaced by online publications that are not peer reviewed.

You're attacking a strawman.