Current publications distorting science
Anna Kushnir
Wednesday, 08 October 2008 23:01 UTC
A recent article in PLoS Medicine, “Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science” by Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli, addresses the “grade inflation” inflicted by high impact journals on the progress and evaluation of science. It’s definitely worth a read.
The authors state that:
“The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic.”
Findings published in high impact journals are more highly cited by other researchers, the media, and policy makers, which inflates their importance and skews the field of research. The “artificial scarcity” of space in the print journals exaggerates the selectivity of the journals. This can be easily solved by digital publication:
“Digital platforms can facilitate the publication of greater numbers of appropriately peer-reviewed manuscripts with reasonable hypotheses and sound methods. Digitally formatted publication need not be limited to few journals, or only to open-access journals. Ideally, all journals could publish in digital form manuscripts that they have received and reviewed and that they consider unsuitable for print publication based on subjective assessments of priority.”
Is this likely to happen sometime in the future? Will journals come in two parts – print and digital?
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I can’t see that happening – they’re more likely to set up a separate journal to publish the stuff that’s not for their main journal. Someone on the inside could correct me, but that seems to be one of the roles of PLoS One.
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One of the many, er, issues with this opinion-style article (which I read a few days ago in another context) is that many issues are confounded.
For example, in the selection you have provided, the literature being discussed in your first italic quote are clinical trials data, not basic research. Then the authors go on to make general statements about high-impact journals, naming a few that do not publish research in this area.
In the second italic quotation you provide, the suggestion does not take into account the substantial costs of supporting the peer-review process, editing and formatting the articles (assuming that people don’t want to read them in manuscript form) and maintaining a website.
Some journals/publishers are publishing large quantities of manuscripts in the way proposed, eg Biology Direct, (other) BMC journals, PLOS One, and a publisher from India whose name I am sorry to say I have forgotten. But many others are not. There are several different publishing models, including the one that Bob mentions.
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Hindawi is the name of the publisher that I’d forgotten yesterday.
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I did anticipate the holes in the logic in this article. I was interested in the proposition that journals no longer have to be constrained by page limits – anything and everything can be posted on the web. Having a separate title for on-line publications, as Bob suggests, wouldn’t solve the problem entirely as people are still more trusting and impressed by print publications. The print journal would still maintain a higher impact factor than its online sibling. Separating the same journal into two, however, is a different proposition. I am not sure it’s a viable one, but there it is. I think the costs of editing manuscripts can be offset by the revenue generated by online publications. PLoS ONE remains the PLoS family cash cow.
I guess I am just wondering out loud, whether the era of print journals will one day come to an end.
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One aspect that must be considered re print verse e-journals is longevity of the record. e-journals are stored as electrons on a few small junction capacitors in various devices around the world. A decent e.m. pulse could wipe it all out. Paper and its analogues have a centuries time scale of survivability, enhanced by multiple repositories. Journals stored on digital media are often inherently ephemeral.
Note that this is often the case with modern art media. what is the consensus estimate for the durability of a shark in formaldehyde?
against a “traditional” art work?
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Are you saying that an online journal is less stable than a print one? Really? I am not sure I agree. As someone who has spilled water on both my laptop and many a journal, I can say with some certainty that data stored on a server far away from me is more safe than a biodegradable and susceptible piece of paper in my hands. It’s the very fact that the data is stored all over the world and backed up in multiple places that makes it so stable. What are the chances of a huge EM burst at this point? Is it actually high? There is also the issue of accessibility. One print journal in one library is not much use. One paper on one server can be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people – who can then choose to print it out and preserve it as they wish.
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@Anna – I understand what you mean by convenience but I am talking on the timescale of the historical record. That pdf you download from science direct is backed up many times at Elsevier but the residence time of the information is short. A good analogy is the instability of film stock and early video recordings. will the historical record of our science be there for historians to examine some centuries in the future or will we remain like Roger Bacon, science with few records but much in hearsay?
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It’s an interesting point you bring up. In my mind, digital = permanent and physical = destructible. Whether that rule can hold for centuries… I don’t know. Unless the planet suffers some sort of set-back forces us to abandon computer technology (and put me firmly out of a job), I think computers and digital preservation is here to stay. Even old books are now being digitized so that they can be preserved for posterity! Computers are evolving and becoming better and more stable by the day. I think they are the future, when it comes to historical record, not print
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How do copyright libraries deal with online publications? If they keep hard copies, there is as much a record of permanence as there is for anything only published on paper.
I suspect all journals will move to become online, but how that impacts how journals set themselves up remains to be seen. I can see journals becoming parts of a larger publishing model, with tiers of importance, and papers moving up and down them. But there might be other models as well. It’ll be interesting to watch.
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Copyright libraries have an immense problem with space. I believe they still (in the UK) keep paper (hard) copies. There is a real problem in maintaining such physical depositories and obtaining land in the ancient university cities. I am not at all clear as to their position on digital media but they do not keep an archive of film or graphic art to the best of my knowledge.
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