7 ms·

I think the most important point was brushed over in the article--that journals offer prestige. Scientists are entirely aware of the problems, yet they still v

I think the most important point was brushed over in the article--that journals offer prestige. Scientists are entirely aware of the problems, yet they still volunteer to submit their work to them, because they significantly improve the chances of promotion and tenure. These things are already tremendously competitive, so most would rather not volunteer for a handicap by publishing in other venues.

DarkContinent 11y ago
So then the problem is the university tenure system, not the journals.
jeffwass 11y ago
You've hit the nail on the head. Journals like Nature and Science are usually considered the top (at least for physics, which I studied). Getting even one article published in these is a big deal. As a grad student you've got it made for when you apply for a post doc. The irony is that most (probably all) of the researchers would gladly want their articles shared widely, and I couldn't see any researcher in favour of restricting access to an interested party wanting to see their work. That said, if you're not in academia, you may have good luck emailing professors directly asking if they can share a copy of their paper. I've been out of school for several years now, but professors sometimes even included such PDFs on their webpages for general public consumption. Not sure if that violates any terms of the publishing journal though.
- praseodym 11y ago
  Usually you can publish a draft version of your paper, but not the version that is edited by the journal. They should be mostly the same, though.
  - jeffwass 11y ago
    Often people post to the Arxiv as well, clearly not formatted the same way as the journal publication. But in many cases the exact same text. I'm not sure if some journals like Nature prevent or discourage you from doing this.
    - mandor 11y ago
      Nature (and the vast majory of journals) is OK with posting on arxiv the pre-review manuscript, but not the post-review (ie, with the changes made after the comments by the reviewers) and not the version they edited (and added their page layout). Some journals allow us to post the post-review paper (at any rate, the changes are usually mostly cosmetic).
x1798DE 11y ago
One thing that can be done here without saying, "all government research must be free" would be to explicitly put funding priority on labs that have a history of publishing in open access journals, or prioritize grants where the author commits ahead of time that they will publish in open access journals. A big part of success in modern scientific research is ability to secure funding, so if you put your thumbs on the scales enough, it could catalyze a move to open access journals as the "prestigious journals."
wrsh07 11y ago
If it's truly misaligned incentives [ie universities are more likely to promote researchers who publish in "top" journals], then it seems like a high-powered university needs to change their criteria for promotion. Instead of requiring publication in top journals for promo, look at other metrics for quality [I imagine this differs some from one field to another]. Imagine if every conference charged speakers for speaking, and in order to get promoted you had to speak at those conferences. It's the same thing. Except most software engineers are happy not paying to speak at conferences because their promo doesn't require it.
- ufo 11y ago
  Its not just the universities. At least in my country, universities are are ranked based on what journals their faculty publishes in and this affects the distribution of grants and other vital research money.
- maaku 11y ago
  You get promotions and tenure for doing successful grant work that brings in money to the University. You get the best grants by publishing in Science and Nature. The government (main source of grants) shares the blame here.
  - dubya 11y ago
    Grants are not judged by government bureaucrats, but by committees of peer researchers. (At least for NSF grants; not sure about NIH or others).
    - sidrajaram 11y ago
      NIH too.
    - maaku 11y ago
      Working under the direction of a grant agency. I know, I worked at two such institutes that managed $10m/yr grant money for planetary and biological science. In this case (NASA) the selection was done based on recommendations from a peer committee, but under directions from civil servants who had the final say, and there was a definite culture of favoritism for the prestigious closed journals. It was good for the institute too -- Science and Nature publications and associated PR raised our image in the eyes of our managers at HQ in Washington.
p4bl0 11y ago
Exactly. The open access problem is very tied to the « publish or perish » one. Interestingly, the biggest publishers are the ones who lobby in favor of bibliometrics, and even sell off-the-shelf bibliometrics solutions (e.g., SciVal by Elsevier). One of the major problem is that bibliometrics criteria are necessarily impacted by inertia of prestige, and publishers own the title of the most prestigious journals. Older, tenured scientists could just go and stop publishing in those journals to build up the prestige of new (really) open access ones, but the fact is that most often they co-authors papers with their students or at least younger, un-tenured scientists, and they understandably don't want to sacrifice the careers of the new generation. Some funding agencies now requires that work they fund are made open access, but sadly, publishers lobby in the US and in Bruxelles weight a lot in favor of "authors pay" model, and many funding agencies includes publishing budget in research grant for this reason. That is very frustrating because people mix up real open access with open access paid by authors, while 1- other economical models are possible (see my other comments on this page), and 2- countries and funding agencies could legally enforce that every papers published in a non-open access journal must be made available immediately in an open repository such as arXiv, overruling the decision of publishers who often put an embargo of e.g. 2 years before this can be done.
- mandor 11y ago
  In H2020 projects (EU projects), the maximum embargo that can be "tolerated" is 6 months (then it has to be on arxiv) [12 months for social sciences]. However, all journals are OK with an arxiv post of the submitted (pre-review) manuscript, and this is what every authors should do.
dougmccune 11y ago
One thing to watch in this space: Thomson Reuters created the Impact Factor, which is a mechanism for ranking journals based on the citation count of a journal's published papers. This is the de facto way academics are judged and compared. The cynical view of a tenure application is that it basically boils down to adding up points for how many high-IF journals you've published in. They are now selling the IP division that owns the Impact Factor. No news just yet (as far as I am aware) on who will end up buying it, but depending on who it is I could potentially see some backlash (finally) within academia if there's an unavoidable conflict of interest (ie if Elsevier buys it). That said, inertia is stronger than anyone wants to admit in academia, so I wouldn't be surprised if IF stays the dominant force in academic reputation for a long time to come. But maybe, just maybe, the time is right for the fall of Impact Factor.
simula67 11y ago
> most would rather not volunteer for a handicap by publishing in other venues. Why not publish in both places ?
mizzao 11y ago
Preprints offer a way forward here, allowing scientists to both publish in "prestigious" venues and disseminate their work more easily: See for example http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/science/asap-bio-biologists-published-to-the-internet.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/science/asap-bio-biologist...
- fintler 11y ago
  Unfortunately, the preprint loophole doesn't really help all that much (depending on the publisher). A few stipulations come along with publishing preprints -- for example, IEEE makes you take down the preprint and add a copyright notice to it after your paper has been accepted. https://www.ieee.org/documents/author_faq.pdf https://www.ieee.org/documents/author_faq.pdf
  - mizzao 11y ago
    It depends on the field, but some areas are more friendly toward this than others.
Paul-ish 11y ago
Grant giving institutions could adopt something like NIH's NIH Public Access Policy[1], which requires articles to be available to the public within 12 months of publication. It isn't perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. It essentially causes everyone in that field at once to switch over to the new system, so that research don't need to stick their career on the line to make a statement about publishing. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy

DarkContinent 11y ago

So then the problem is the university tenure system, not the journals.

jeffwass 11y ago

You've hit the nail on the head. Journals like Nature and Science are usually considered the top (at least for physics, which I studied). Getting even one article published in these is a big deal. As a grad student you've got it made for when you apply for a post doc. The irony is that most (probably all) of the researchers would gladly want their articles shared widely, and I couldn't see any researcher in favour of restricting access to an interested party wanting to see their work. That said, if you're not in academia, you may have good luck emailing professors directly asking if they can share a copy of their paper. I've been out of school for several years now, but professors sometimes even included such PDFs on their webpages for general public consumption. Not sure if that violates any terms of the publishing journal though.

praseodym 11y ago
Usually you can publish a draft version of your paper, but not the version that is edited by the journal. They should be mostly the same, though.
- jeffwass 11y ago
  Often people post to the Arxiv as well, clearly not formatted the same way as the journal publication. But in many cases the exact same text. I'm not sure if some journals like Nature prevent or discourage you from doing this.
  - mandor 11y ago
    Nature (and the vast majory of journals) is OK with posting on arxiv the pre-review manuscript, but not the post-review (ie, with the changes made after the comments by the reviewers) and not the version they edited (and added their page layout). Some journals allow us to post the post-review paper (at any rate, the changes are usually mostly cosmetic).

x1798DE 11y ago

One thing that can be done here without saying, "all government research must be free" would be to explicitly put funding priority on labs that have a history of publishing in open access journals, or prioritize grants where the author commits ahead of time that they will publish in open access journals. A big part of success in modern scientific research is ability to secure funding, so if you put your thumbs on the scales enough, it could catalyze a move to open access journals as the "prestigious journals."

wrsh07 11y ago

If it's truly misaligned incentives [ie universities are more likely to promote researchers who publish in "top" journals], then it seems like a high-powered university needs to change their criteria for promotion. Instead of requiring publication in top journals for promo, look at other metrics for quality [I imagine this differs some from one field to another]. Imagine if every conference charged speakers for speaking, and in order to get promoted you had to speak at those conferences. It's the same thing. Except most software engineers are happy not paying to speak at conferences because their promo doesn't require it.

ufo 11y ago
Its not just the universities. At least in my country, universities are are ranked based on what journals their faculty publishes in and this affects the distribution of grants and other vital research money.
maaku 11y ago
You get promotions and tenure for doing successful grant work that brings in money to the University. You get the best grants by publishing in Science and Nature. The government (main source of grants) shares the blame here.
- dubya 11y ago
  Grants are not judged by government bureaucrats, but by committees of peer researchers. (At least for NSF grants; not sure about NIH or others).
  - sidrajaram 11y ago
    NIH too.
  - maaku 11y ago
    Working under the direction of a grant agency. I know, I worked at two such institutes that managed $10m/yr grant money for planetary and biological science. In this case (NASA) the selection was done based on recommendations from a peer committee, but under directions from civil servants who had the final say, and there was a definite culture of favoritism for the prestigious closed journals. It was good for the institute too -- Science and Nature publications and associated PR raised our image in the eyes of our managers at HQ in Washington.

p4bl0 11y ago

Exactly. The open access problem is very tied to the « publish or perish » one. Interestingly, the biggest publishers are the ones who lobby in favor of bibliometrics, and even sell off-the-shelf bibliometrics solutions (e.g., SciVal by Elsevier). One of the major problem is that bibliometrics criteria are necessarily impacted by inertia of prestige, and publishers own the title of the most prestigious journals. Older, tenured scientists could just go and stop publishing in those journals to build up the prestige of new (really) open access ones, but the fact is that most often they co-authors papers with their students or at least younger, un-tenured scientists, and they understandably don't want to sacrifice the careers of the new generation. Some funding agencies now requires that work they fund are made open access, but sadly, publishers lobby in the US and in Bruxelles weight a lot in favor of "authors pay" model, and many funding agencies includes publishing budget in research grant for this reason. That is very frustrating because people mix up real open access with open access paid by authors, while 1- other economical models are possible (see my other comments on this page), and 2- countries and funding agencies could legally enforce that every papers published in a non-open access journal must be made available immediately in an open repository such as arXiv, overruling the decision of publishers who often put an embargo of e.g. 2 years before this can be done.

mandor 11y ago
In H2020 projects (EU projects), the maximum embargo that can be "tolerated" is 6 months (then it has to be on arxiv) [12 months for social sciences]. However, all journals are OK with an arxiv post of the submitted (pre-review) manuscript, and this is what every authors should do.

dougmccune 11y ago

One thing to watch in this space: Thomson Reuters created the Impact Factor, which is a mechanism for ranking journals based on the citation count of a journal's published papers. This is the de facto way academics are judged and compared. The cynical view of a tenure application is that it basically boils down to adding up points for how many high-IF journals you've published in. They are now selling the IP division that owns the Impact Factor. No news just yet (as far as I am aware) on who will end up buying it, but depending on who it is I could potentially see some backlash (finally) within academia if there's an unavoidable conflict of interest (ie if Elsevier buys it). That said, inertia is stronger than anyone wants to admit in academia, so I wouldn't be surprised if IF stays the dominant force in academic reputation for a long time to come. But maybe, just maybe, the time is right for the fall of Impact Factor.

simula67 11y ago

> most would rather not volunteer for a handicap by publishing in other venues. Why not publish in both places ?

mizzao 11y ago

Preprints offer a way forward here, allowing scientists to both publish in "prestigious" venues and disseminate their work more easily: See for example http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/science/asap-bio-biologists-published-to-the-internet.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/science/asap-bio-biologist...

fintler 11y ago
Unfortunately, the preprint loophole doesn't really help all that much (depending on the publisher). A few stipulations come along with publishing preprints -- for example, IEEE makes you take down the preprint and add a copyright notice to it after your paper has been accepted. https://www.ieee.org/documents/author_faq.pdf https://www.ieee.org/documents/author_faq.pdf
- mizzao 11y ago
  It depends on the field, but some areas are more friendly toward this than others.

Paul-ish 11y ago

Grant giving institutions could adopt something like NIH's NIH Public Access Policy[1], which requires articles to be available to the public within 12 months of publication. It isn't perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. It essentially causes everyone in that field at once to switch over to the new system, so that research don't need to stick their career on the line to make a statement about publishing. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy