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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Fascinating discussion. The mediaeval monks would be agreeing about the longevity of the “moribund medium” as a previous web editor of Nature calls it.
One of the points alluded to in my first response, but not picked up further, is the cost. I think it is generally underestimated how much cost there is to a publisher in hosting online “everything that is submitted to it and that ‘passes’ technical peer review”. Not only is the publisher sending vastly more papers out to reviwers with all the associated costs of that, but it is not “free” to publish on the web – a mistake made in many a calculation or hasty comment. Formatting papers and providing all the web support they need is non-trivial. In some ways, the discussion about digital vs paper preservation is less about the actual paper (usually backed-up in multi places these days) but the data supported by the paper. That’s a whole other ballpark, though.
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There’s a good piece here by John Timmer of Ars Technica which picks up on some of the practical issues of the proposal for all-online publication, as well as pointing to a few other flaws in the “economic model” argument.
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Thanks for the link, Maxine. I had been wondering whether to read the paper properly, but it looks like it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
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Thanks, Bob.
I think I meant to write “the data that the paper supports”, though! -
Perhaps a good investment of graduate student time is to have them chisel key papers into stone cliffs.
Until there is a landslide.
Or acid rain…
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I think that would be a better thesis project than some I have seen, Jon. Really though, what are the current developments in ensuring the integrity and preservation of these publications? Anyone know?
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Are you asking how publishers archive their digital content, Anna? There are various consortia and organisations that collaborate with libraries and other parties on this front: NPG is in one called Portico, along with many other publishers. (I have posted about this previously at Nautilus.)
The WW3 consortium also has an archiving initiative.
Various libraries also have huge digital archiving projects, not just for journals but including them.
Probably an internet search will reveal these and more.
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