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Jan
31
2012
Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.
Many scientists were miffed by the introduction of the Research Works Act, which would roll back the US government's open access policy for research it funds. Some of that annoyance was directed toward the commercial publishers that were supporting the bill. That, combined with a series of grievances about the pricing policies of one publisher, Elsevier, has now led a number of scientists to start a boycott—they won't publish in or review for journals from that publisher.
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The Faculty of 1000 is a site that organizes what's been termed "post-publication peer review." Instead of reviewing publications prior to their being published, the Faculty of 1000 comments on papers in their areas of research after they've been published, adding an additional layer of quality and sanity checking (something that, unfortunately, is often needed).
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Faculty of 1000 is launching F1000 research, which is a different twist on academic publishing. When a manuscript is submitted to F1000R, an editor will provide a basic sanity check and, if it passes, the paper will immediately be published under a Creative Commons license. Only after it's online will the journal arrange for reviewers to perform peer review on it. Reviewers' scope will be limited to the scientific validity of the results and won't include an evaluation of the paper's significance. Other researchers will be able to attach comments to the paper that will act a bit like informal reviews. F1000R will also host any large datasets associated with the publications.
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Jan
25
2012
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a recent experience in which he was recruited by "a prestigious venue" to review a paper that related in some ways to research he had done. Barlow's work wasn't mentioned anywhere in the piece. Barlow said he realized that the journal editor figured Barlow would be annoyed by the omission. And although he was, Barlow said he didn't feel assigning the piece to him was fair to the author. "It was a set-up. The editor didn't want a positive review, so the burden of rejection was passed on to someone the author would not know."
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traditional peer review simply delays publication and leaves decision-making "in the dark." Peer review -- in the sense that people will comment on work and a consensus may emerge that a given paper is important or not -- doesn't need to take place prior to publication, he said.
the peer review system for scholarly journals doesn’t work very well, needs to be reformed, and really ought to take radical advantage of new technologies. There is, of course, going to be quite a bit of resistance to any change coming from the usual quarters, beginning with older academics who still think of social networking in terms of meeting colleagues after work for a martini (well, okay, nothing wrong with that), administrators who are used to the simple (and simplistic) bean counting operations for tenure and promotion made possible by the current system, and journal publishers who make a ton of money while adding next to nothing in value to people’s publications (after all, they don’t pay for the research, don’t pay the writers, and don’t pay the editors and reviewers — which of course doesn’t stop them from charging an arm and a leg to university libraries).
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as a matter of fact most peer review has always taken place after publication. A lot of bad or simply irrelevant stuff gets published and ends up augmenting someone’s c.v. by a line or two (good for promotion and tenure!), but then dies the common death of much academic scholarship: complete lack of citations by anyone other than the author.
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The question that Barlow is raising is whether it wouldn’t be better to skip the preliminary step — the pre-publication filter — and simply leave everything to the community at large.
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Aug
31
2011
Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a "keep out" sign on the gates.
You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.
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universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it's not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.
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The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer's words) because they "develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication in the past 15 years". But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more.
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Aug
13
2011
Richard Steen's paper, Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?, and discussions of some of its controversial findings were the ones that motivated me to take a detailed look at retractions of papers by Indian authors. Here's one of Steen's findings:
Retracted papers are more likely to appear in journals with a high impact factor (IF), are more likely to involve certain ‘repeat offender’ authors and are more likely to involve authors from the USA. [Bold emphasis added by me]
Just the other day, Retraction Watch linked to a study which looked at retractions by a bunch of journals spanning a wide range of impact factors, and found "a surprisingly robust correlation between the journal retraction index and its impact factor."
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Richard Steen's paper, Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?, and discussions of some of its controversial findings were the ones that motivated me to take a detailed look at retractions of papers by Indian authors. Here's one of Steen's findings:
Retracted papers are more likely to appear in journals with a high impact factor (IF), are more likely to involve certain ‘repeat offender’ authors and are more likely to involve authors from the USA. [Bold emphasis added by me]
Just the other day, Retraction Watch linked to a study which looked at retractions by a bunch of journals spanning a wide range of impact factors, and found "a surprisingly robust correlation between the journal retraction index and its impact factor."
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Richard Steen's paper, Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?, and discussions of some of its controversial findings were the ones that motivated me to take a detailed look at retractions of papers by Indian authors. Here's one of Steen's findings:
Retracted papers are more likely to appear in journals with a high impact factor (IF), are more likely to involve certain ‘repeat offender’ authors and are more likely to involve authors from the USA. [Bold emphasis added by me]
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[T]here were just 22 retraction notices that appeared in journals 10 years ago, but 139 were published in 2006 and by last year, the number reached 339. Through July of this year, there were a total 210 retractions, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which maintains an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals.
Meanwhile, retractions related to fraud rose more than sevenfold between 2004 and 2009, exceeding a twofold rise traced to mistakes, according to an analysis published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. After studying 742 papers that were withdrawn from 2000 to 2010, the analysis found that 73.5 percent were retracted simply for error, but 26.6 percent were retracted for fraud. Ominously, 31.8 percent of retracted papers were not noted as retracted (read the abstract).
The conclusion? Either there is more fraud or more policing? Ivan Oransky, the executive editor of Reuters Health and a co-founder of the Retraction Watch blog that began recently in response to the spate of retractions, writes us that the simple use of eyeballs and software that can detect plagiarism has made it possible to root out bad papers.
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He also notes, however, that there are more journals, which explains why there are more papers, in general, being published. “So the question is whether there have been more retractions per paper published,” Oransky writes, and then points to this chart to note that were, indeed, many more.
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Jun
25
2011
. With Bowker reporting an "explosive growth" of 169% last month in "non-traditional" publishing, it's not just vanity projects that are taking the self-publishing route these days. Amazon announced last week that John Locke had sold 1,010,370 Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing, making him the first self-published author to join the "Kindle Million Club", alongside the likes of Stieg Larsson and James Patterson. Meanwhile, self-published authors Louise Voss and Mark Edwards currently top Amazon.co.uk's Kindle bestseller list, and say they're selling up to 1,900 copies a day of their jointly-written thriller, Catch Your Death. Faulkner award-winning author John Edgar Wideman last year chose to publish his new collection of short stories through Lulu.com; the site, offering authors an 80/20 revenue split, has published over 1.1 million authors to date, adding 20,000 titles to its catalogue a month. Writers around the world are getting their books to readers – and getting paid for it – without a publisher standing in between. Self-publishing, it seems, is becoming respectable.
Jun
23
2011
writers now have a different option: crowdfunding their next novel.
That’s the idea behind Unbound, a new site from the U.K. that allows donors to pledge cash to authors in exchange for things like signed hard copies of the book, goodie bags and invites to the launch party. You can even choose to fund the entire project, in which case you get … I don’t know, say, a back massage and a chicken dinner. The point is, you’re directly involved in the process.
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One thing is for sure–traditional publishing isn’t getting anymore lucrative. That means under the current system, if you’re not selling a sure thing, publishers probably aren’t going to buy it. Hopefully crowdfunding sites like Unbound can change all of that–it sure beats waiting for a wealthy benefactor, anyway.
Jun
21
2011
Since the Kindle's launch, Amazon has heralded each new arrival into what it calls the "Kindle Million Club," the group of authors who have sold over 1 million Kindle e-books. There have been seven authors in this club up 'til now - some of the big names in publishing: Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts for example.
But the admission today of the eighth member of this club is really quite extraordinary. Not because John Locke is a 60 year old former insurance salesman from Kentucky with no writing or publishing background. But because John Locke has accomplished the feat of selling one million e-books as a completely self-published author.
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Rather than being published by major publishing house - and all the perks that have long been associated with that (marketing, book tours, prime shelf space in retail stores) - Locke has sold 1,010,370 Kindle books (as of yesterday) having used Kindle Direct Publishing to get his e-books into the Amazon store. No major publisher. No major marketing.
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Most of the e-books sell for $.99, and he says he makes 35 cents on every sale. That sort of per book profit is something that authors would never get from a traditional book deal.
Mar
12
2011
If you asked most scientists what their goals were, the answer would boil down to the generation of new knowledge. But, at some point, science and scientists have to interact with money and administrators, which has significant consequences for science. For instance, when trying to employ someone to do a job, you try to objectively decide if the skills set of the prospective employee matches that required to do the job. In science, the same question has to be asked—instead of being asked once per job interview, however, this question gets asked all the time.
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being both a working scientist and a science writer gives me a unique perspective on science, scientific publications, and the significance of scientific work. The final disclosure should be that I have never published in any of the top rank physics journals or in Science, Nature, or PNAS. I don't believe I have an axe to grind about that, but I am also sure that you can ascribe some of my opinions to PNAS envy.
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If you asked most scientists what their goals were, the answer would boil down to the generation of new knowledge. But, at some point, science and scientists have to interact with money and administrators, which has significant consequences for science. For instance, when trying to employ someone to do a job, you try to objectively decide if the skills set of the prospective employee matches that required to do the job. In science, the same question has to be asked—instead of being asked once per job interview, however, this question gets asked all the time.
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