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It's Time For Academics To Take Back Control Of Research Journals (theguardian.com)
Stephen Curry, a professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, has a piece on The Guardian today in which he outlines the history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research. An excerpt from the article: "Publish or perish" has long been the mantra of seeking to make a success of their research career. Reputations are built on the ability to communicate something new to the world. Increasingly, however, they are determined by numbers, not by words, as universities are caught in a tangle of management targets composed of academic journal impact factors, university rankings and scores in the government's research excellence framework. The chase for metricised success has been further exacerbated by the takeover of scholarly publishing by profit-seeking commercial companies, which pose as partners but no longer seem properly in tune with academia. Evidence of the growing divergence between academic and commercial interests is visible in the secrecy around negotiations on subscription and open access charges. It's also clear from the popularity among academics of the controversial site Sci-Hub, which has made over 60m research articles freely available on the internet. Over-worked researchers could be forgiven for thinking that the time-honoured mantra has morphed to "publish, and perish anyway."
The summary is pretentious enough. "Caught in a tangle of management targets"?
This other industry.
Eventually, talent won't be running the show - professional managers will, or it probably won't survive. And the managers won't necessarily have the best interests of the talent first, and sometimes not even second or third.
Sci-Hub is not the solution. The issue is twofold: First, scientists (still) believe they must publish; they don't -- do achieve something in your field of research, and the world will know. Second, publications must be controlled by researchers and only stuff that really matters should be published. Science needs a shift or values and priorities, a Second Renaissance.
There seem to be several "open source" journals, but I'm wondering how seriously they are taken, especially to the University Gods that dish out tenure? I don't know...
But also, how about some of these "prestigious" universities publish their own damn journals?
In the end, the for-profit journals that one apparently has to be published in will continue to flourish as long as the university communities themselves publish in them, judge peers by them, and pay the astronomical subscriptions to them.
In other words, these people complaining about the state of "professional; journals are in control of the entire situation.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Happen to the free exchange of ideas?
See the quantum journal http://quantum-journal.org/ for an example.
If academics agreed to retain their right to publish original articles on their own web page, things would be fine. Why would anyone agree to give away the right to put their own work up on their own web site?
I mean, really, why do they need them? Other than putting stuff onto actual paper, which these days seems somewhat pointless since most of this will actually be consumed digitally anyway. Are you telling me the academic world can't work out a way to coordinate peer review and put out papers without the help of massive commercial academic publishers?
And if they do, how the hell has Amazon not stepped into the field and undercut everyone? About the only thing I can see the publishers have going for them is momentum and legacy at this point.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
There are some truly ridiculous subscription fees to obtain access to journal papers. The alternative is billing the author for open access fees, where the paper is available freely as soon as it's published. This sounds great except there are some very sketchy open access journals. Some of them are referred to as predatory open access journals, which collect open access fees but don't actually send papers out for peer review.
I'm relatively new in my career as a scientist, and I don't have that many publications to my name yet. I received an email from a company asking me to be an editor for a new journal. It was pretty obvious that my contact information was harvested somewhere and not reviewed prior to contacting me. The journal doesn't have any publications yet, but there are plenty of sites indicating that the company is a predatory journal publisher. They've also been accused of contacting reviewers for the peer review process and sending out papers regardless of whether the reviewer agrees or declines to review the paper. They seemed very sketchy to me. Obviously I declined.
I'd like to see most journals be under the control of professional societies rather than for-profit publishers. Some of the publishers are okay, but there are many that are extremely sketchy. I'd also like to make all reviews public to make the process more transparent. I understand that the concern is retaliation for negative reviews, but if there is no anonymity in the process, it's difficult for someone to retaliate without putting their name on it. I've had some very fair reviewers, but also some very unprofessional ones. I'd like to see more transparency in the review process, to limit the possibility for abuse.
If academics are going to be judged on publications, they should only be judged on their publications within reputable journals and those run by professional societies. Take away the incentive to run up the number of publications by paying predatory open access journals to publish their manuscripts.
The value in publications is in the selection mechanism that gives things published a pedigree.
Doing that with publishers was necessary in the 1900's.
Another way to skin that cat this century might be.
The author originates a paper and makes it available to the public in multiple places on the Internet.
The author computes a crypto hash of the paper and adds the publication to a blockchain.
Folks can review the document and put their review, including a rating, in the blockchain.
Then all we need is a mechanism to scan the block chain and rate the reviewers and the papers.
Multiple competing algorithms can provide this value different ways, but access to the paper is free.
We may be moving from publish or perish, publish good stuff or perish and also publishers perish?
The impact factor of a journal is supposedly the moving average over the latest two years of the number of citations to papers published in it. Is the IF of web journals and open publication sites counted in this ranking, or is this still another private club for the legacy journals?
The issue here is less about greedy journals and more about the fact that universities are being run like businesses which results in the "publish or perish" expectation. The system has become completely mismanaged into being a capitalist nightmare where you do what they want or you lose what you love. I believe this could be remedied if it became exceptionally difficult to revoke tenure, requiring that colleagues agree to it. The greedy journals problem can easily be done away with by freely releasing the research and only allowing non-profit journals to publish their work.
TL;DR: The problem is the culture of university administrations, not with the researchers themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"Pi are round. Pi is not squared."
Sci-Hub is not the solution. The issue is twofold: First, scientists (still) believe they must publish; they don't -- do achieve something in your field of research, and the world will know.
It is the new researchers who need to publish. Yes, once you've established a reputation in your field, people will know who you are. But that very often takes decades. Until then, you need publications to show you have a track record of good work.
(And even then, the reputation is usually phrased in terms of what you published: "e.g., "X published one of the seminal papers on bismith selenide semiconductors." And it will be two decades between when you published your paper and when the rest of the world starts putting bismuth selenide in their high-end devices.)
There seem to be several "open source" journals, but I'm wondering how seriously they are taken, especially to the University Gods that dish out tenure?
Some are, some aren't.
The problem is, the entry barrier to putting up a website and giving it a prestigious journal title is pretty much zero. So there are literally thousands of "open source journals" that have no redeeming merit whatsoever, and the ones which are actually real tend to get buried in the clutter.
I'd bet that a month after the rating system was announced, people would start setting up sock puppet robots and selling ratings.
You stupid sonofabitch. Who do you think edits the journals? They're supposed to be in bed together.
Or would you be more comfortable if we turned to "regular folks" to edit the Journal of Computational Physics?
However, for real physics this might be a problem.</flamebait>
As we look around the world, though, it's clear that there are many thousands of academics in universities of varying quality who would also like to have their work published, even if it's not in, for example, one of the ACM's or IEEE's Transactions journals. So we now have a slew of journals focused on computer science, some of which are, to be polite, not very selective about what they publish, as long as the authors pay the publication fee. There are also more and more low-quality journals that publish online using an open access approach. Many of these journals use highly credible names, and it's easy for a novice to confuse them with well-known and higher-quality journals. If you do a search on "fake journals in computer science', you will see that there are hundreds of such journals; if you go to the web page for such a journal, it looks real, complete with editorial board members who hold academic positions. Life would be simpler if these fake journals didn't exist, but most of them seem to find enough paying authors to put out new volumes of their journals. If your papers are continually rejected by the program committees for various conferences, this may be the only way to publish your work, even if it's not very good. Indeed, some of these journals have published papers that were generated by bots.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with submitting your work to be published in one of these fake journals. You can tell your Mom that you are a published author, and you can include this "publication" on your CV, but it won't help you to become a full Professor at a reputable university.
If you are not an academic at an institution that evaluates your publication record for promotion, then this whole process probably seems silly to you. In that case, you can view the promotion process as a game where you play by certain established rules, just as people in industry tend to play by a different set of rules to get promoted and earn raises.
Nobody reads.
The combo of conferences and the lecture circuit is how impactful science is circulated.
The journal article provides the details to the interested.
The ONLY purpose of a journal is to assure that someone reviewed the work.
Of course you can count impact factor for web journals or open publications. Its just a statistic, like average word count or average daily site visitors. There is no governing authority of impact factor.
Uh, isn't Thomson whatever they are / were sold to now the governing authority? AFAIK you don't get a score if they don't give you one.
Academics are already in control. This is what they devolve into when given the opportunity.
Wait, he does more than playing basketball? [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Spoken behalf of fabricated resveratrol, carbon dioxide, and medical research.
... but if this gets the government of California to stop funneling money into how you shouldn't even be in the SAME ROOM as your cell phone, I'll call it a win.