
Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals - nkurz
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals?CMP=twt_fd
======
001sky
What's interesting here, is that this is not a technology problem. Nor is it a
science problem. Nor economics. Its a strictly speaking one of sociology. The
things ostensibly being bought, sold and traded are not the tru determinants
of value. The value of Science to an investor is a function of its monopoly
position in the distribution of its content; and on its dervivative value as a
"citation" flag to grant-writers and tenure comittees. The demand to "feed"
this system is really driven on the supply side. The monopoly side on the
backend is just an artificial scarcity model and barrier to entry, that
indirectly feeds back into the supply function. That is to say, the "citation"
credential needs artificial scarcity to function in its role of extracting
derivative rents. It is the grant writers and the tenure comittees that ensure
they have this subsidy, as a negative cost (free labour) of production. While
none of this is new to anyone reading here, the mechanics are worth thinking
through. Because the system is sponsored by public money (on the grants and
indirectly, the academics) on the one hand, and on the other through public
policy (monopoly rights to the iP that comes out of publicly funded research
is <given for free> to monopolist publishers). The sociology of all of this is
to avoid "mistakes" in the allocation of funds and tenure. That is to say, the
adbication of the experts...to other "experts". But as the article points
out...the grant writers and the tenure comittees are abdicating responsibility
to.... _journalists_...not scientists or actual experts, per-se in their
fields. At least, that is the essence of the critique leveled herein.

------
marshray
Interesting how they don't use the word "open" even once in that article,
whereas the Nobel prize winning scientist makes that a cornerstone of his
proposed solution:

 _There is a better way, through the new breed of open-access journals that
are free for anybody to read, and have no expensive subscriptions to promote._
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-
jou...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-
nature-science-cell-damage-science)

~~~
bengillies
It's probably worth pointing out that open access, while important, isn't
really relevant to this discussion as publishers like Nature already embrace
open access.

(disclaimer, I work for Digital Science, which is owned by the company that
owns Nature)

~~~
ihnorton

        It's probably worth pointing out that open access,
        while important, isn't really relevant to this discussion  
        as publishers like Nature already embrace open access.
    

Uh, I just tried accessing a random article in Nature and hit the $32/article
paywall. So no, don't think so.

~~~
eli
I think Science articles are free one year after they're published.

~~~
rmk2
Just in case anybody wants to read a bit more about this: This is Green Open
Access, which usually means that the publication is blocked for a while, but
usually doesn't cost the author (or their institution) anything extra. The
other option is Gold Open Access, which, depending on journal, can get rather
pricey, but makes the article openly available _immediately_.

→
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Implementation_pra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Implementation_practices)

------
acadien
This is an impossible system to break when grant distributors completely
require that you have recently published in a luxury journal in order to
garner funding. The same problem happens with tenure track committees.

Most of the scientists I know are _desperate_ for funding now, and so they
have made an even bigger push to publish in a big name journal. It's an insane
system, but I've never heard of a viable solution for it.

~~~
xerophtye
I just want to put this thought out on the open, what about crowd-funding?
Would that ever work for research? Like you can make all the papers free to
read, and at the end provide a link to donate to their research. Or they can
showcase that this is what we are working on, this is how far we have gotten.
Now we want to do this but for that we need this amount of Money. Help us out?

Would something like that work? Or the primary success of crowd sourcing is
that people see it as a "pre-order market for cool new gadgets" instead of the
whole "this thing should exist! I'll help!" ?

~~~
Fomite
There is some crowd funding for science, but it's pretty much small potatoes -
it'll cover a trip, or maybe a single publication, or the budget for some
preliminary data.

Even tiny, "Pilot Study" grants are often for an order of magnitude more than
usually comes in via crowdfunding. And some of the large studies...just isn't
going to happen without _major_ changes in how and what people fund.

Science is expensive.

~~~
troymc
What do you call it when tens of thousands of volunteer birdwatchers pay for
their own personal efforts (in time and money) to do bird monitoring in the
UK? Cumulatively that's a lot of money, not "small potatoes."

[http://www.bto.org/about-bto](http://www.bto.org/about-bto)

The BTO isn't the only example. There are many others (e.g. the BOINC
projects, Planet Hunters, EyeWire, The Amateur Sky Survey).

Maybe you'll object, saying that's not "crowdfunding." If it's not, then what
is it? There's definitely funding being spent, on scientific research, by "the
crowd" (i.e. the general public).

~~~
toufka
It is, and those are great examples. But it's only accessible to the most
sexy, most accessible, most 'fun' disciplines. The harder stuff just cannot be
crowd-sourced right now. Biomedical research is expensive, dull, and removed
from most peoples' experience, and so it'd be very difficult to get a crowd
interested in funding basic biomedical research.

~~~
xerophtye
But i think Biomedical can still attract people. Nobody likes diseases.
everyone would be ok to contribute to eliminating diseases or coming up with
better cures/surgeries.

What's tough, is to get funding for weird theoretical quantum mechanics stuff.
How do you ask for funding to things people have absolutely no idea about?

~~~
tlarkworthy
maybe you could crowd fund the first expensive study into CACK-3 protein that
may or may not be related to disease X. But after the 100th randomly named
protein investigation people are going to be bored and sceptical it makes
progress. These studies just say protein X seems to be related to protein Y.
It takes an excruciatingly long time to make progress on the high level goal
of understanding a pathology. I bet half the bio people doing experiments
don't even know why they are doing them either.

~~~
shiven
Classic example highlighting the difference between Research/Discovery _vs_
Development.

Kickstarter and their crowd-funding ilk are fine when it comes to Developing a
product but good luck getting funding for anything as iffy as R&D, more so in
the biomedical realm.

------
hessenwolf
Honestly - ex academic here - I've come across a couple of research topics
that I'd really like to publish in, and I have zero interest in pissing
through a peer review process.

I am thinking of throwing something into the glossy professional journal, and
maybe doing a whitepaper or two on the corporate website. That way, people
will link and refer to it if it is good, and they won't if it is not - and it
will disappear or be referenced accordingly.

I intend to include the data and code, so everything can be verified
independently.

That the rest of the publishing world is simultaneously going down that same
path seems to me an inevitability.

~~~
triplepoint217
You might also think about putting it on the arXiv (arxiv.org). I think they
take articles that haven't been submitted to journals, and it is a bit of a
recognized source of articles (there are citation guidelines for arxiv
articles for example).

------
spodek
These top science journals may want to look at Encyclopedia Britannica's
recent history because the article's quote from an executive editor at Science
sounds suspiciously like what people at Britannica said as they saw what could
have been their opportunity pass them by like they were standing still.

> _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."_

On another note, if I were an enterprising graduate student looking for a
project to work on, I'd see this as a great opportunity to work with a Nobel-
prize winner on something important enough to him for promoting science that
he took this stand, taking away time to work on his other passions.

~~~
baldfat
The analogy of Britanica is off due to one fact:

Britanica could get a thousands and some millions for not producing a single
issue off their old catalog! As a former Digital Librarian it is a serious
racket!

~~~
dublinben
The same is completely true of large journals. Access to their back catalogs
is still incredibly expensive.

------
anigbrowl
_Monica Bradford, executive editor at_ Science, _said: "We have a large
circulation and printing additional papers has a real economic cost…_

One wonders if _Science_ is one of those journals that invites reviewers to
work for free because being a reviewer is so prestigious. Unpaid review
constitutes a significant subsidy to the academic publishing industry:
[http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/402189.article](http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/402189.article)
It seems to me that the marginal cost of publication is actually fairly low,
especially given the rather exorbitant prices the top journals charge just to
read a paper ($30 for non-library purchases, which is more than the cost of
the print edition).

~~~
neumann
don't forget the $300 per page charged to the author for any colour
reproductions in print.

------
rdl
In our field, it is time to support USENIX over IEEE and ACM, over the Open
Access issue, too. I'm boycotting IEEE and ACM until they support Open Access.

Amazingly, they're going after authors making their own papers available!

~~~
shadowfox
Not quite sure this is true about the ACM. From their policy about rights
permanently retained by the author [1]:

* Post the Accepted Version of the Work on (1) the Author's home page, (2) the Owner's institutional repository, or (3) any repository legally mandated by an agency funding the research on which the Work is based

* Post an "Author-Izer" link enabling free downloads of the Version of Record in the ACM Digital Library on (1) the Author's home page or (2) the Owner's institutional repository;

[1]
[http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Re...](http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Retained)

~~~
rdl
This wouldn't allow the author to post it to another repository, if not
legally required, distinct from his home page. (It was IEEE which was more
aggressive recently, but from reading Matt Blaze, it looks like ACM and IEEE
have traded off that role; neither is as bad as Elsevier, but they're
allegedly 'on our side' vs. a commercial publisher, so anything short of full
OA brings dishonor to them.)

------
pizza_boy
The key is to start developing better ways to measure researcher productivity.
That's where all the different forms of altmetrics come in. For us
(Publons.com) we're using peer review itself to generate article level metrics
(and give reviewers credit for it) that focus on the quality and significance
of a paper, not just its popularity.

------
andrewfong
Are there any funding sources focused entirely on the unsexy stuff? E.g.
showing X is reproducible or that targeting gene Y does not do anything
interesting. Seems like an area where targeted NSF funding can help.

~~~
pekk
good luck getting NSF funding for anything new

------
kevrone
I'm curious, because I don't really know this system, if other scientists feel
this way. I have some inkling that journals can often publish erroneous papers
(maybe I got that idea from Nate Silver?), but that would be so very
unfortunate for Science's reputation. I hope it's not that bad.

~~~
mbreese
Journals like to publish sexy/novel papers. That can lead to them publishing
some things that are "hot", but not necessarily well proven. The arsenic
bacteria from a couple of years back is a good example [1].

In their rush to publish, solid work which may not be as sexy can get pushed
to lower tier journals, whereas "novel" things that aren't as well proven can
get elevated to top-tier journals. At this level, things aren't necessarily
the pure meritocracy that we like to think it is. Then again, these are for-
profit publishers. There is nothing that says what they _have_ to accept, and
they can choose what they want to publish. The only thing that will change the
system is large-scale or big-name boycotts like this one.

[1]
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163)

------
tokenadult
The Nobel laureate profiled in this article researches biology, and has won
the Nobel prize for medicine and physiology. You would hope that research on
medicine, of all subjects, would be published in journals that never make
mistakes, but Science, arguably the most prestigious journal in the world,
definitely published a mistaken article about cell biology quite recently,[1]
so we have to wonder how well even the most prestigious journal does peer
review of what it publishes. A medical doctor who studies the scientific
research process in general thinks that a great many published research
findings are probably false,[2] so there have to be greater efforts on the
part of scientists to get peer review right, and improve scientific
publication practices.

From Jelte Wicherts writing in Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience (an
open-access journal) comes a set of general suggestions [3] on how to make the
peer-review process in scientific publishing more reliable. Wicherts does a
lot of research on this issue to try to reduce the number of dubious
publications in his main discipline, the psychology of human intelligence.

"With the emergence of online publishing, opportunities to maximize
transparency of scientific research have grown considerably. However, these
possibilities are still only marginally used. We argue for the implementation
of (1) peer-reviewed peer review, (2) transparent editorial hierarchies, and
(3) online data publication. First, peer-reviewed peer review entails a
community-wide review system in which reviews are published online and rated
by peers. This ensures accountability of reviewers, thereby increasing
academic quality of reviews. Second, reviewers who write many highly regarded
reviews may move to higher editorial positions. Third, online publication of
data ensures the possibility of independent verification of inferential claims
in published papers. This counters statistical errors and overly positive
reporting of statistical results. We illustrate the benefits of these
strategies by discussing an example in which the classical publication system
has gone awry, namely controversial IQ research. We argue that this case would
have likely been avoided using more transparent publication practices. We
argue that the proposed system leads to better reviews, meritocratic editorial
hierarchies, and a higher degree of replicability of statistical analyses."

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/12/this_paper_should_not_have_been_published.html)

[https://www.sciencenews.org/node/5635](https://www.sciencenews.org/node/5635)

[http://www.nature.com/news/arsenic-life-bacterium-prefers-
ph...](http://www.nature.com/news/arsenic-life-bacterium-prefers-phosphorus-
after-all-1.11520)

[2]
[http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...](http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

[http://www.bx.psu.edu/~anton/bioinf1-lectures/mccarthy2008.p...](http://www.bx.psu.edu/~anton/bioinf1-lectures/mccarthy2008.pdf)

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003081)

[3]
[http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338...](http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00020/full)

~~~
colechristensen
>You would hope that research on medicine, of all subjects, would be published
in journals that never make mistakes

I wouldn't hope this, and maybe it's pedantic, but there's an important point
to make here. Scientific articles are evidence, not truth, and people (and
systems) make mistakes. The hallmark of a robust system is not the absence of
error, for it is arrogance to believe you've ever achieved it and foolish to
have it as your absolute goal. What is important is setting a reasonable
expectation of accuracy, the types of errors committed, the root causes of
those errors, and responsible, transparent reactions when errors are made.

A system is much more trustworthy when it has a solid history of errors with
reasonable responses than a system which claims or appears to suffer from no
error at all.

~~~
chmike
Exactly. Reviewers expected to be experts in a field can only check claims
against their own knowledge. Their role should be recognized as limited to
that and not to have some monopole on the "real truth". Fear of error could
make them overly protective if not paranoid.

In my sense, scholar communication means should be open but with mechanism to
weed oud obvious crap and mechanism for efficient self correction.

------
user1239321421
OK, Tenured Professor at UC Berkeley with loads of Nature, Science, and Cell
papers who recently won a Nobel Prize ... I'll go against the grain here upon
your command and not follow the footsteps of those that made it to the top of
the system off of the back of luxury publications.

------
jvdh
This almost sounds like they should take away his Nobel prize immediately.
Abusing the spotlight to promote his own journal is just ridiculous. (Open
access != free)

Bonus points for getting the Nobel prize through publications in those
journals, and only denouncing them after he won.

~~~
rflrob
Better late than never, I say. Nor do I think he waited to win his Nobel to
promote open access, as his editorship of an OA journal would attest to.

It's also worth pointing out hat eLife is actually free to publish in, at
least for the moment. The founding organizations (HHMI, the Wellcome Trust,
and the Max Planck Institutes) are footing the bill for the first few years.

~~~
epaladin
So, get a base established and then start charging $5000 per submission?

~~~
Crito
Try waiting until that actually happens before you get outraged over it.
Getting yourself worked up over hypothetical situations that play out in your
mind is not good for your health.

------
kriro
Science needs better disruption and I am very happy that a nobel winner is
willing to do this.

Whenever I read these stories I feel a little ashamed that I'm not working
towards this disruption right now.

------
beloch
/slowclap

Bravo sir. Bravo.

Here's to a world where a researcher who _hasn 't_ won a Nobel prize can do
the same to journals that manipulate impact factor without regard for the
consequences to science!

~~~
Fomite
Indeed. It's a step forward, sure, but it's easy if you _have_ papers in Cell,
Nature and Science (which he does) _and_ a Nobel to say "Yeah, nuts to this".

I'd be much more impressed by a public stance defending young tenure track
faculty making a commitment to open access.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Easy or not, this kind of statements from big names is exactly what is needed
to solve the problem. If I say this kind of things (as a young researcher with
a modest track record) no one will listen to me. If every Nobel prize winner
said this kind of things, maybe the politicians who set the evaluation
criteria for grants and tenure (yes, often their are scientists, but they are
doing politics) would be forced to change things.

------
eddyparkinson
It is sad that the grant system is focused on selecting "elite" people, rather
than improving the system. Improvements to the "research system" should be
encouraged.

------
davecap1
The thing is, once you have a Nobel Prize, it doesn't really matter where you
publish...

------
gergely
If Aaron Swartz would live and hear it.

------
leeoniya
would be great if he declares this in his acceptance speech to a stadium full
of top researchers.

