Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific
process and represent a "tyranny" that must be broken, according to a
Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.
Randy
Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or
medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said
his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.
Dr.
Schekman said pressure to publish in "luxury" journals encouraged
researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead
of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by
editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured
studies that were likely to make a splash.
The
prestige of appearing in the major journals has led the Chinese Academy
of Sciences to pay successful authors the equivalent of $30,000. Some
researchers made half of their income through such "bribes", Dr.
Schekman said in an interview.
Writing in the Guardian,
Dr. Schekman raises serious concerns over the journals' practices and
calls on others in the scientific community to take action.
"I have published in the big brands, including papers that won me a Nobel Prize. But no longer," he writes. "Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of bonus culture, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals."
Dr. Schekman is the editor of eLife, an online journal set up by the Wellcome Trust. Articles submitted to the journal - a competitor to Nature, Cell and Science - are discussed by reviewers who are working scientists and accepted if all agree. The papers are free for anyone to read.
Dr.
Schekman criticises Nature, Cell and Science for artificially
restricting the number of papers they accept, a policy he says stokes
demand "like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags." He
also attacks a widespread metric called an "impact factor", used by many
top-tier journals in their marketing.
A journal's
impact factor is a measure of how often its papers are cited, and is
used as a proxy for quality. But Schekman said it was "toxic influence"
on science that "introduced a distortion". He writes: "A paper can
become highly cited because it is good science - or because it is
eye-catching, provocative, or wrong."
Daniel Sirkis, a
post doctoral researcher in Schekman's lab, said many scientists wasted
a lot of time trying to get their work into Cell, Science and Nature.
"It's true I could have a harder time getting my foot in the door of
certain elite institutions without papers in these journals during my
post doctoral researcher, but I don't think I'd want to do science at a
place that had this as one of their most important criteria for hiring
anyway," he told the Guardian.
Sebastian Springer, a
biochemist at Jacobs University in Bremen, who worked with Dr. Schekman
at the University of California, Berkeley, said he agreed there were
major problems in scientific publishing, but no better model yet
existed. "The system is not meritocratic. You don't necessarily see the
best papers published in those journals. The editors are not
professional scientists, they are journalists, which isn't necessarily
the greatest problem, but they emphasise novelty over solid work," he
said.
Mr. Springer said it was not enough for
individual scientists to take a stand. Scientists are hired and awarded
grants and fellowships on the basis of which journals they publish in.
"The hiring committees all around the world need to acknowledge this
issue," he said.
Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief at Nature,
said the journal had worked with the scientific community for more than
140 years and the support it had from authors and reviewers was
validation that it served their needs.
"We select research for publication in Nature on the basis of scientific significance. That in turn may lead to citation impact and media coverage, but Nature editors aren't driven by those considerations, and couldn't predict them even if they wished to do so," he said.
"The
research community tends towards an over-reliance in assessing research
by the journal in which it appears, or the impact factor of that
journal. In a survey Nature Publishing Group conducted this year of over
20,000 scientists, the three most important factors in choosing a
journal to submit to were: the reputation of the journal; the relevance
of the journal content to their discipline; and the journal's impact
factor. My colleagues and I have expressed concerns about over-reliance
on impact factors many times over the years, both in the pages of Nature and elsewhere."
Monica Bradford, executive editor at Science,
said: "We have a large circulation and printing additional papers has a
real economic cost . . . Our editorial staff is dedicated to ensuring a
thorough and professional peer review upon which they determine which
papers to select for inclusion in our journal. There is nothing
artificial about the acceptance rate. It reflects the scope and mission
of our journal."
~The Hindu
