'Academic Publishing is Broken'

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Unless I am unaware of some crucial component of publishing in which journals routinely publicize withdrawn submissions?

I didn't read that. And you couldn't withdraw it after submitting it, yuo wouldn't know until it's gone to print.

At least in medical fields, as far as I am aware, you can withdraw a paper at any time prior to publication by contacting the editorial office, although it's not usually considered ethical to withdraw it for reasons other than finding that the research contains serious flaws, and god help you if you withdraw it to submit it to a different journal because your ass will get blacklisted.

I guess it depends on the editorial process and how much notice you get before it goes to print. A lot of electronics and instrumentation magazines do it by theme. If you submit and your topic has come up it could be very quick indeed.

I can believe that, for sure, but I'm not sure those follow the same protocols as peer-reviewed academic journals? I don't know a ton of published researchers, but I've never heard of anyone not receiving notification and congratulations that their study was accepted for publication. Usually there's a whole process, including in some cases an opportunity to defend criticisms or answer questions if the reviewers have any.

All university publications would go through that process, but at least of electronics, industry people wouldn't follow them too closely.

I don't know shit about electronics and instrumentation magazines. Are magazines, in this context, the same as research journals?

[Faust]

Unless I am unaware of some crucial component of publishing in which journals routinely publicize withdrawn submissions?

I didn't read that. And you couldn't withdraw it after submitting it, yuo wouldn't know until it's gone to print.

At least in medical fields, as far as I am aware, you can withdraw a paper at any time prior to publication by contacting the editorial office, although it's not usually considered ethical to withdraw it for reasons other than finding that the research contains serious flaws, and god help you if you withdraw it to submit it to a different journal because your ass will get blacklisted.

I guess it depends on the editorial process and how much notice you get before it goes to print. A lot of electronics and instrumentation magazines do it by theme. If you submit and your topic has come up it could be very quick indeed.

I can believe that, for sure, but I'm not sure those follow the same protocols as peer-reviewed academic journals? I don't know a ton of published researchers, but I've never heard of anyone not receiving notification and congratulations that their study was accepted for publication. Usually there's a whole process, including in some cases an opportunity to defend criticisms or answer questions if the reviewers have any.

All university publications would go through that process, but at least of electronics, industry people wouldn't follow them too closely.

I don't know shit about electronics and instrumentation magazines. Are magazines, in this context, the same as research journals?

We'll they go through peer review and they call you up to defend parts of it, the only thing is questions from the public are only taken when the public gets to read it, unlike say a viva where anyone can sit in until the commitee decide to grill you.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Unless I am unaware of some crucial component of publishing in which journals routinely publicize withdrawn submissions?

I didn't read that. And you couldn't withdraw it after submitting it, yuo wouldn't know until it's gone to print.

At least in medical fields, as far as I am aware, you can withdraw a paper at any time prior to publication by contacting the editorial office, although it's not usually considered ethical to withdraw it for reasons other than finding that the research contains serious flaws, and god help you if you withdraw it to submit it to a different journal because your ass will get blacklisted.

I guess it depends on the editorial process and how much notice you get before it goes to print. A lot of electronics and instrumentation magazines do it by theme. If you submit and your topic has come up it could be very quick indeed.

I can believe that, for sure, but I'm not sure those follow the same protocols as peer-reviewed academic journals? I don't know a ton of published researchers, but I've never heard of anyone not receiving notification and congratulations that their study was accepted for publication. Usually there's a whole process, including in some cases an opportunity to defend criticisms or answer questions if the reviewers have any.

All university publications would go through that process, but at least of electronics, industry people wouldn't follow them too closely.

I don't know shit about electronics and instrumentation magazines. Are magazines, in this context, the same as research journals?

We'll they go through peer review and they call you up to defend parts of it, the only thing is questions from the public are only taken when the public gets to read it, unlike say a viva where anyone can sit in until the commitee decide to grill you.

Unlike the process some researchers go through of submitting and resubmitting and being rejected by reviewers who clearly did not understand, or in some cases even read, their papers? There are so many issues with personality grudges affecting what gets accepted, especially in the more prestigious journals, and anonymity issues where are rarely even addressed.

[Doktor Howl]

Hey, this defines our scientific publishing system:  "Sir, please take my money and then let me use something I THOUGHT UP.", but what's REALLY important is quibbling over minutia.

My PERSONAL problem, however, is never having found anyone I COULD pay to tell me what I already thought.  I hand over the article, give them the raw data, their HEAD EXPLODES under the load and then I just take my article back from the dead body before the squad arrives, as well as whatever cash they had on them when I walked in.  Its an amusing way to make a little extra scratch once in a while, but I'm no better off academically for all that effort and some of the stains you get from bursting craniums just plain won't come out. 

I didn't publish this finding.  Oh, poo.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I wonder if there's a way to introduce a viable alternative model, and what that might look like?

[Kai]

I wonder if there's a way to introduce a viable alternative model, and what that might look like?

Open access peer reviewed publication with anonymous pre-pub review and public post-pub review.

I mean, why do people publish things in the first place? Well, in many cases it's to make money, but fundamentally it's to get noticed. I can publish natural history stuff on my blog all day, but it probably won't add to The Pile because it isn't archived with Zoological Record.

In science there's also the extra effort needed to decide what is good and what is not. In literature, criticism is something more generally available. You or I or Joe Shmo down the street could criticize a novel and regardless of our background we might all have something interesting to say about it. But scientific research requires a more careful reading, and given the extensive background each paper relies for it's basis, the reader also needs to have knowledge of the field of research.

After publication, peer review pretty much handles itself. Researchers aren't known for being quiet about other people's mistakes. If an experiment is flawed, that will come out eventually. The more public the criticism, the faster the flaws will be revealed. With the Internet, such things are nearly instantaneous.

The pre-review is more tricky. It's a balancing act between letting one's field of research (or journal) being notorious for absolute dredge (the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology doesn't exactly look good right now), and such a stickler that nothing creative or wildly revolutionary gets through the process. On one side is a ruined reputation, and on the other is stasis and decay. So you do some basic fact checking by letting other researchers pre-review the articles of their peers, maybe improve the articles, sometimes discard them entirely.  Public pre-review would mean no one would ever want to review, lest you cross someone; publications are a researcher's reputation. And paying reviewers would just add more incentive for corruption. I've already determined that pulling reviewers from people who have more time on their hands is not advisable. Sometimes pre-review backfires, the ever possible failure of such a balance. But it works enough of the time for it to be effective.

Since people volunteer their time to do all this, the only cost of the publication is the printing and pre-printing design and editing. Open access journals avoid the thievery of Elsevier et al by making the product freely available.

tl;dr:  PLoSOne /is/ the viable, alternative model. It's the best you'll get.

I'm starting to think that post-review is where the improvement needs to come.

[hirley0]

5:11 Bored {maybe

[Cain]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/10/science-open-access-publishing

Research that is funded by the public should be freely available to all – a move to open access modes of publication is overdue

As a scientist and citizen I want to see the universal adoption of the open access model of academic publishing, because it will be better for science and better for society.

Open access, where costs are met upfront by the author and papers are free to readers, would improve science by making all published results and ideas easily accessible to researchers across the world and so fuel the engine of discovery. At present, far too much of our research is locked behind paywalls that restrict access and stall progress.


By shifting ownership of scientific literature away from commercial publishers, open access also provides a clear acknowledgement that the bulk of its value comes from publicly funded scientists and not from publishing companies. This is an overdue correction that will also facilitate the spread of scientific information beyond the research community and among the wider public who, through their taxes and donations to charity, have a moral right to its outputs.


In a connected world, more and more people are realising that they need – and deserve – access to the scientific literature they have paid for, be they patient groups seeking to understand the latest medical research or citizens trying to grapple with research that impacts public policy on important issues such as climate change, drug use or genetically modified foods. Arguably, most members of the public would not be able to understand the primary scientific literature even if they had free access, but the mere fact of its availability – through a shift to open access – should stimulate a healthy demand from the public for more digestible reports from the scientists they support. Direct exposure of the scientific community to the public appetite for research results could even have positive effects on the formulation of research priorities.

More at link

[Kai]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/10/science-open-access-publishing

Research that is funded by the public should be freely available to all – a move to open access modes of publication is overdue

As a scientist and citizen I want to see the universal adoption of the open access model of academic publishing, because it will be better for science and better for society.

Open access, where costs are met upfront by the author and papers are free to readers, would improve science by making all published results and ideas easily accessible to researchers across the world and so fuel the engine of discovery. At present, far too much of our research is locked behind paywalls that restrict access and stall progress.


By shifting ownership of scientific literature away from commercial publishers, open access also provides a clear acknowledgement that the bulk of its value comes from publicly funded scientists and not from publishing companies. This is an overdue correction that will also facilitate the spread of scientific information beyond the research community and among the wider public who, through their taxes and donations to charity, have a moral right to its outputs.


In a connected world, more and more people are realising that they need – and deserve – access to the scientific literature they have paid for, be they patient groups seeking to understand the latest medical research or citizens trying to grapple with research that impacts public policy on important issues such as climate change, drug use or genetically modified foods. Arguably, most members of the public would not be able to understand the primary scientific literature even if they had free access, but the mere fact of its availability – through a shift to open access – should stimulate a healthy demand from the public for more digestible reports from the scientists they support. Direct exposure of the scientific community to the public appetite for research results could even have positive effects on the formulation of research priorities.

More at link

Great article. But to the bolded point -- I am suddenly reminded of Yudowsky's essay "To Spread Science, Keep it Secret".  It may not be relevant, though it is what sprang to mind while reading that line.

[Kai]

I have a confession to make.

The upcoming article I have now in press is /not/ open access.

It didn't cost out the wazoo to get published, because, like some other journals associated with professional societies, Entomological News nee American Entomological Society doesn't go through a Elsevier-esque publisher. But it does mean I can't just post a link to the article or hand it out on a website. I plan on blogging it when it comes out (not the sort of thing that people put in press releases), but it does bother me that this journal did not have an open access option. I would have paid for it, if it did.

Furthermore, the assistantship that allowed me do the work and write the paper was funded by the Department of Energy, so it's public money. This is, thankfully, only a smaller paper from a much larger project, and when finished will hopefully be published in a journal that has an open access option (like Freshwater Science).

[Cain]

There's a new philosophy journal out that is open access, and dedicated to publishing short (4,500 words or less) essays

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2161-2234

Unfortunately, it's going to close after two years, but I suspect this is being run as a trial for more open acess, short essay journals, so please spread the link freely and visit it as much as possible.

[Telarus]

There's some interesting developments with some Psychology journals:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to-come-undone/29045

[Kai]

There's some interesting developments with some Psychology journals:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to-come-undone/29045

Nosek told Science that a senior colleague warned him not to take this on "because psychology is under threat and this could make us look bad." In a Google discussion group, one of the researchers involved in the project wrote that it was important to stay "on message" and portray the effort to the news media as "protecting our science, not tearing it down."

Sounds like religion to me.

[Triple Zero]

Man this makes me seethe.

Besides telling people in detail about it, what else can we do to address this? How can we start peeling greedy capitalist's fingers off of science research?

One important part of this whole scam is--at least it was for me--as long as you're on a University network, you can access all journals your uni pays the subscription for and never even notice there's a paywall involved. Because they whitelist by IP and only if your IP is not on the whitelist you get to see the paywall.

Of course you do notice it as soon as you try and access a paper at home, but at that point, while I was still in uni, I'd just go "oh I'll SSH-tunnel through my uni account as a proxy and get it like that" (or similar solutions). And then forget about it.

Only after I did not have access to that account anymore did I discover how many scientific papers are actually hidden from public view. But then you're outside, and no longer in a position to complain about it.

I think this is part of it, a lot of researchers/professors practically live in their university office, and they never get confronted with the lack of their research' availability to the general public. All the peers they communicate with are also on university networks.

Fortunately, a lot of Computational Science papers (which is a subject I gladly devour a paper on, every now and then) are hosted on author's websites. True that some of them are "early drafts", but that doesn't really matter because the research is often long done by then, it's just some minor polishing before publication.

Re: Nigel/Faust's confusion. I think it's important to realize that different Sciences publish in different journals, and they all have different rules and guidelines for publishing. Nigel being more familiar with the medical and socio-demographical publications (I'm guessing from the sort of things she often quotes research on), and Faust with the electronics/computers/comp.sci articles. It's also different per university.

Fortunately, things appear to be changing.

And otherwise we just need a few bold students to "liberate" some journals, like the JSTOR/MIT scandal. Except not get caught.

[Triple Zero]

The other part would be to start writing in nirmal english. I used to hate checking papers for writing errors because i wouldnt immediately know if a word was made up or what. I think a big part of science illiteracy is that no one can really see what science is saying other than a poor summary in the news.

I'm not sure what you mean? That scientific articles are often badly written with bad grammar?

That's because it's often written by people whose first language is not English.

Some are really bad at it. But even when you're good with English, it's still pretty hard to use correct wordings for "serious" articles. When I look back at a few reports/articles I've written in English, some sentences are pretty bent, and I remember I spent a lot of time wrecking my brain to figure out in what order the words should go.