How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science, opinion, The Guardian
“We all know what distorting incentives have done to finance and banking. The incentives my colleagues face are not huge bonuses, but the professional rewards that accompany publication in prestigious journals – chiefly Nature, Cell and Science. … These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept. The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called “impact factor” – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking.”
Keith’s note: NASA is completely addicted to the mindset mentioned in this opinion piece. NASA allows itself to have terms dictated to them by Science and Nature as to how and when research news can be released rather than the other way around. Yet NASA has an “impact factor” and “reach” that vastly eclipses anything that these journals can offer. Its time for NASA to grow a spine and tell these journals that NASA is going to set the rules with regard to when and how NASA-funded research is going to be released.
Quite right. Past editors of ‘Nature’ (such as John Maddox) were prepared to welcome papers which cogently challenged orthodoxy. Now it has become a lickspittle publication, fasttracking what’s fashionable and rejecting dissenting papers. How is science supposed to advance with a one-track mind?
Meh. This is basically an advertorial for “open access” style journals. The payout is given in this statement “As I know from my editorship of eLife, an open access journal…”.
Yeah, it’s not surprising that he disses the competition.
You are a reliably surprising commenter, Dr. Landis 🙂
if this is an advertorial for open access, then every paper submitted to Nature and Science are advertorials for those pay-for-access profiteers.
Well said Keith, I think NASA could have a larger impact by publishing their findings right on NASA.gov
Journals ought to be pleased that NASA picks them not the other way around.
No, it’s time that all government funded researchers, managers, fund-granters, and legislators realised that the largest source of US research in Nature/Science is US government funded. The second largest is non-govt-funded US university research. The largest group of unpaid-volunteer editors/reviewers is those same government funded researchers, the second largest is those universities. Without these researchers, these journals would be half a thick and a fraction as valuable.
If the US government were to create its own sets of general and subject specific electronic journals, with all government funded research required to apply to publish in those e-Journals for a period (6-12 months) before submitting elsewhere, and with funding agencies required to prioritise research in the official govt e-Journals over research published elsewhere (as they prioritise work published in name-brand journals over second-tier journals), then the name-brand for-profit journals would wither and die. [The cost of running the e-Journals wouldn’t be trivial compared to the size of the US govt science-research budget.]
And if other countries, other governments, also realised the same thing, and established international research e-Journals, then those for-profit journals would die out almost overnight.
“If the US government were to create its own sets of general and subject specific electronic journals…”
You have just described the NASA Technical Memorandum (“NASA TM”) series.
At the moment, however, NASA is emphasizing (and giving credit for) publishing in peer-reviewed technical journals, and not TMs.
Yeah, stick that on the front page of nasa.gov, make a big deal out of it, and it can become plenty prominent with impact enough to take over the role of the journals at last for NASA concerns.
There are excellent peer-reviewed freely-accessible journals su ch as PLoS. The best journals are the ones that will publish readable and reliable (even if mundane) scientific data as quickly and openly as possible so as to make it available to other researchers. The worst are the ones that charge readers for access to the full text. Authors of work published with tax dollars are already permitted by law to put copies of their own papers on the internet and permit free access.
Most journals embargo articles until they are published. Pre-prints circulate freely.