
The findings of medical research are disseminated too slowly - jimsojim
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21719438-about-change-findings-medical-research-are-disseminated-too
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Gatsky
No no no no....

Don't give them more money! Journals already have far too much power. They
already publish research in a way that serves their own financial needs. They
are too slow. They make you do all the writing, editing, formatting and figure
design for free, then they charge people to read your publicly funded
research. They make you put your data in an excel spreadsheet or a PDF. They
fail miserably at peer review. At my institution, editors of nature journals
are going around and giving seminars on how to publish in their journal -
journal editors giving SEMINARS to ACTUAL SCIENTISTS. Absurdity.

All of this will sink journals. They just don't know it yet. Their strategy
seems to be to become more like news outlets, publishing opinion pieces on how
to fix scientific publishing, yet never actually changing what they do. The
only reason it survives is because more than anybody, scientists learn to put
up with all sorts of shit.

~~~
pen2l
> They make you do all the writing, editing, formatting and figure design for
> free

Shouldn't research scientists be the ones who write? I mean, who else knows
the intimate details about your experiments that need to be communicated to
posterity? And, do they really make you do the formatting? My understanding is
you basically just give them an easily readable pdf version of your paper...
in standard double spaced 12 font arial, and when it gets accepted they are
the ones who choose the pretty fonts (probably with Indesign) and revise your
figures so they don't look crappy.

That said, I'll say one nice thing about the system (partly in the spirit of
contrarianism, as hardly anyone has good things to say about top journals:)).
If you really want to be published in a top journal, there are two routes: 1)
make something really ground-breaking... and then you can even submit a
crappily-formatted paper with ugly figures and you'll still get accepted --
and they'll make good figures _for_ you! 2) have something decently good...
make good figures, make sure you follow formatting guidelines to a tee and
make everything as easy as possible for the editors, and then hope for the
best. I think this situation is not too bad.

~~~
Gatsky
Obviously you write your own paper. The point is the journals profit from your
work, yet they expect you to do everything for free. Then they charge your
university's library a fortune so you can access your own paper. If someone
wants to reuse a figure from your paper, which you made yourself, and
represents data from publicly funded research on patients that donated their
time and body for the betterment of society, the journal wants to charge $500.

I've realised that scientists will put up with almost anything. You have to be
that way, otherwise you won't last. But when Elsevier makes billions of
dollars in profit, and the person that reviews the papers for them lives in a
box subsisting on instant noodles with no job security, you have to ask some
questions. We don't actually need Elsevier. If they disappeared tomorrow
science would march on largely unperturbed. Elsevier needs the scientists, and
bless them, they have found a way to put us to work for free and sell us the
product at the same time.

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ssivark
While I appreciate the trend towards open-access and wider dissemination, I
don't think that the _slowness_ of dissemination is one of the bigger problems
in medicine.

Given that the subject deals with trying to "fix" complex, organic systems,
it's worth taking time to get things right before designing interventions. It
is important to realize that a flood of rapid communication often makes it
harder to settle on the underlying truth (as clearly evidenced by the recent
atmosphere) by rendering the search process unstable.

As some other articles (on the HN front page) have recently argued, the rush
to faster publication is one of the biggest causes of research debt. And I
think that is a much more important problem to solve. So, by all means let's
have open-access and also more distilled dissemination. But optimizing for
speed (eg: race to publish) often gets in the way of correctness.

~~~
kolinko
Right now we have research that is slow to publish, but publishing is careful,
and once published we treat is as a kind of truth. You can call it a
"Brittanica" approach.

Alternative is not just a faster publishing, but more feedback, and better
discussion around the subject. You could call it a "Wikipedia" approach.

In the "Wikipedia" approach, you don't rely on the publisher's prestige, nor
citations, as a meter of trustworthiness. Before accepting the results you
review it's discussions and critique.

A similar switch happened with traditional news publishing. Years ago you had
to rely on the fact that an article was published in Economist, and vetted by
their good editors. Nowadays, there is a lot of independent content, and there
are communities (like HN, or Reddit's AskScience), and non-profits (fact
checkers, or Snopes) that point out the potential issues.

~~~
russellsprouts
I don't think using the decentralization of news as a comparison is a good
one. I agree that there are great things about new media outlets, but on the
balance we are arguably worse off -- news is more polarized and political than
ever. There's more great analysis and commentary online, but there's also more
analysis and commentary in general.

------
neves
Loved the end of the article:

Having survived three and a half centuries, scientific journals will no doubt
be around for a long time yet. With luck, though, they will return to being
science’s servants, rather than its ringmasters.

------
attractivechaos
The majority of journals I know provide an open-access option: you pay a few
thousand dollars publication fee such that everyone else in the world can read
the electronic version for free. PNAS has this option. Nature, I believe, make
an article free in several months/a year if you opt to open access. A few
funding bodies, such as Wellcome Trust, have requested to publish in the open
access model for several years (these funding bodies pay for the publication
fee as long as you can get your paper accepted). I am not sure what the Gates
foundation is doing differently here.

~~~
Fomite
Note that, to a lab just starting out "A few thousand dollars" is a non-
trivial expenditure.

~~~
attractivechaos
Yeah. Understand that. But journals are not charity. Someone has to pay for
publication and distribution. It is either readers, authors or funding
providers. Or you could get rid of the costly midman/publishers, but I am not
sure an academic world with preprint servers only would be a better one.

~~~
a_bonobo
Some countries/universities have reserved pots of money for OA fees, sadly it
isn't common.

I have myself published a few papers with PhD students that should have been
OA but we used the PhD students' allocated funds to send that student to a
relevant conference, that's a better prospect for their career.

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medymed
Article is about free access to bio/med research. Some thoughts:

Would love to see rate of adoption of new standards of evidence based medical
care as a function of institutional access to top journals or simply Uptodate
(the tool people actually use nowadays). Access to curated guidelines may be
more clinically important than primary lit.

One reason prestigious journals are great is you get the imprimatur of success
for further funding/promotion without needing to wait for citations and
scientific consequence. Perhaps an opensource analytics team will over time
convert the community to other metrics like reads, shares, and other
h-factoresque metrics (granted all are contrived and gamable to some degree),
perhaps tied to some funding consequences. Cough, ResearchGate, cough.

Regarding thread title: The small number of good medical findings are
disseminated far too slowly; the large number of irreproducible,
contradictory, poorly supported, and statistically misinterpreted findings are
disseminated far too quickly. Couldn't resist.

------
ihodes
For those not in the field, it's worth noting that a good deal of research is
disseminated prior to publishing (or while "in press"/waiting to be published)
via conferences or word of mouth.

~~~
davnn
The reach should be quit limited or not? Imo it's kind of the point to make it
accessible to everyone.

------
frozenport
Most research work is fraudulent, how does disseminating it faster address
quality concerns?

------
neves
It says that the fact that physicists share more their work than biological
sciences, because the first ones are more computer savvy. The conspiracy
theorist in me thinks that biological science papers are more forged due to
Big Pharma profit motivations. Physicists have more difficult to manipulate
their data.

