Modern Sisyphus - are scientist's smart to publish in academic journals today?

The publishing of academic work is a tightly controlled process, with critical review taking months and sometimes years of work that needs to stand the test of "experts" believing in your work for it to reach print. This is to ensure quality to avoid that bad, or even misleading work, do not get the quality stamp "scientific" and "peer reviewed". The idea is good, but is it fair under current day standards and is it even abused?

Historically

Testing your experiments against the criticism of your equals is an old concept that dates back before the time of natural scientists. In the age of alchemists and early time of the natural scientists it was simply to dangerous to openly speak of your ideas and theories without putting your life and limbs at stake in Europe. So, the ideas and results was coded or secretly sent between trusted individuals within the same field for commenting or simply sharing the progresses. One such network that included historical figures such as Sir Cheney Culpeper, Benjamin Worsley, and Rober Boyle that were possibly members of the Invisible College.

When the work of national philosophers were vindicated by people in power in the 17^th century discussing theories and results became more public accepted. Actually, in the early days of science the researcher had to perform the experiment in front of a live audience, trying to convince them – the predecessor of today's scientific presentation. Eventually the written form went public and commonly the universities provided the press.

Up into our time the published articles has been taken on by a large and increasing number of publishers. Some mastodons almost monopolizing whole sectors and others grass roots and independent publishers. Today publishing is associated with costs for the journal due to staff and printing costs, but it may have gone a bit out of hand.

Exploitation of researchers in publishing

A scientist today can rarely avoid frequent invitations to review articles, publishing in new journals (often for a fee), share their knowledge in book chapters (often for a fee), not to mention a horde of new conferences inviting your to give a presentation (but often for the fee of attending). It is hard to see this as short of exploitation.

This is probably a “natural” development of how we build our academic sector today. Scientists work for free, or pays, to share the most recent advances to the world. The more people you want to reach with the new knowledge – the more expensive it is (such as making your article Open Access in most journals).

For comparison, consider a journalist. Journalists are seen by many scientists as counter productive to progress since the information they provide to the public often is distorted and misleading making the increasing of knowledge so much harder. The journalist has a much wider audience and the journalist get paid to publish! This puts the voice of scientists at a clear disadvantage since damage control within their field is work that is pro bono.

Just, to highlight the main differences, consider the following generalized financial differences...

General perspective on costs and salary in publishing
	Journalist	Scientist
Writer is measured on how much is published and by the popularity of the published paper?	Yes	Yes
Writer is paid to write?	Yes	No
Writer is paid to review?	Yes	Rarely
Costs can be associated with publishing for writer?	No	Yes
If made available for free the writer pays for it?	No	Yes
If made available for free or published in larger quantities the writer is paid more due to extended use of creative material?	Yes	No

... in short the researcher can suck waxed fruit!

In addition there is a long row of similar things about content, such as integrity, thoroughness of background research, spelling and language, speculation on material presented etc. that are very different depending on whether a scientist or journalist is to publish their material (sadly enough).

Looking at this kind of set-up it is difficult to publish an article without getting a bitter taste in the mouth. One do not feel very clever doing so unless you have a huge sense of Utopia (like me). Actually, it is scary how easy it is to earn fair money for your efforts by taking on a journalist-hat and write a science-sounding article (qualified or not) for a pet magazine or the like.

Good journals do exist

One of my favourite journals is Vet Med Zoot. It is free to publish in. It is journal controlled by an university. It has an impact factor (important to bosses of researchers). It has a good editorial board. It is Open Access. Down side is that MedLine has not listed it yet and it is thus not searchable by researchers only using this tool. But, the journal is close to what the original idea of a publication was supposed to be. More of that please!

Reinventing Science - From Journals to Open Science

Michael Nielsen gives a very nice historical overview on the culture of sharing scientific information at his TED presentation in Waterloo.

As also stated here in the blog, the scientist are generally not rewarded by sharing their information openly. This seems to be a main inhibitor for data and ideas reaching their full potential. The systems financing scientists are simply not geared to welcome sharing discoveries openly. Scientists "jobs" are basically to mass produce articles in quantity as it is a demand in many universities - not to let their ideas have sex with others and advance knowledge faster. This is also turned by the Scientific American in an article from October.

One of my favorite references on the failure of the reward system is Daniel Pinks summarizing of 50 years of research on the subject. And the result is deafening: rewards impair the cognitive abilities! Or, a carrot on a stick makes you dumber. 

Nielsen excel in his talk by making a sucker punch to the sceptics when describing how one of the greatest human monuments, The Human Genome Project. This effort would have been an absolute failure had the idea of Open Science not eventually been forced upon the researchers by grant providers. Researchers were simply too busy "doing science" (publishing) to have time to upload genome sequences. These sequences now uploaded and publicly accessible are feeding hundreds of new science projects just by existing.

It takes bravery, especially by young scientists, to openly embrace and promote Open Science (flattered). But we have to if we are to change the rewarding system of scientists so the scientific community (an others) can benefit openly by the research.

And to those who have not read the previous posts on Open Science I answer "no" in advance to the inevitable referring to journals as already embodying Open Science. Peer reviewed journals are not "open" even when offering the "Open Access" option! Open Access is restricted by people having enough finances to publish for everybody to access the publication. And rarely data sets follow a publication. 

Lots of work to be done!

Michael Nielsen on Open Science and his book on the subject Reinventing Science:

Open Access - rich can publish, poor can read

Nature News published an article "US seeks to make science free for all" by Declan Butler explaining how Open Access publishing of scientific journals is marching forward. Actually it is doing so well that US politicians are pushing forward to make it mandatory.

This is, in my opinion, a step forward towards Open Science. But as stated before, there is a large drawback with Open Access (other scientists may have more): rich can publish, but poor can only read. It is very expensive to publish as Open Access, that it is not even an option to many universities, including my own. So the published science is not "free" to all. It is accessible to read by anyone with an Internet, but it is open universally for the authors.

The big trouble is how to publish and read free of charge, and retain the credibility of peer-reviews.

I hope for better platforms in the future.

Further reading