Scientific publishing, the slow death of academic appeal and what to change
For those who have never been involved in scientific research activities, it might be a little difficult to understand how the process of publishing findings, as well as the whole process of research evaluation, work. In short, there is a system called “peer-review”, which is meant to ensure that all published work has been, prior to publication, evaluated and corrected for quality and scientific soundness by “peers”, other researchers who are knowledgeable in the field, ensuring it respects the scientific method precisely. It seems like a fair, well-thought and overall good process which guarantees that everything we read is of the highest standard and free from any bias and interest.
In practice though, the system is quite broken and I would argue that in its current application it is contributing to a downward spiral of loss of prestige and even credibility of the academic world, which is the biggest contributor to its own problems.
There are three main actors in the whole process of publishing research:
- the researcher(s) who submit a work: author(s)
- the journal it is submitted to for publication
- the other researcher(s) who review the work: peers
Some points to stress:
- the peer-reviewing part of it is carried out on a voluntary basis
- peers are anonymous to authors
- scientific publishers are typically rather lucrative businesses
Scientists should only be interested in the advancement of science, so it is all good and well that they review others’ papers for free. However, it is lots of work, which requires lots of time and the profusion of one’s expertise, and is not rewarded at all by the academic community in terms of career advancement. When you are being assessed for an academic job, the only thing that counts is the number of papers you published, where you published (the reputation of the journals), and the number of grants (funds for research) you won. Nobody cares about the laborious and disinterested work you did to contribute to the life and blood of research itself.
The fact that peers are anonymous is good. But, there is no reason why authors should not be anonymous to the reviewer as well. Even scientists are humans and they have biases, so it’s not difficult to imagine that reviewing a manuscript by a famous and well-respected investigator can, maybe unconsciously, lead someone to behave differently than if the manuscript were from an unknown PhD student. This may contribute to the steep career advancement curve of early-stage researchers, another issue which would deserve some commenting on its own.
Now onto the third point. Journals as we know them today are doing very well without putting much effort into deserving their success. A recent and excellent article by the Guardian [1] outlines how the profitable world of scientific publishing came to be and how it promotes a loop of self-sustained growth at the expense of research. Authors are now at the complete mercy of publishers, who set the rules and make the money. Authors are hungry for publishing on highly-status journals because of how academia measures success; publishers, whether deliberately or not, foster an ill, profit-based mechanism which should be alien to the culture of science and of which they are the only beneficiaries. Publishing means, in many cases, giving out your work for free to someone who is going to sell it at a high price. Also note that in most cases even the editorial and typesetting work of bringing manuscripts to respect style guidelines standards is on the authors, not on the journal.
Is academia fighting back this system? Yes and no.
Among publishers, the evil of all evils is, these days, Elsevier: the same Guardian article above outlines its success story. Elsevier is a giant group of several journals, many of which of high profile. Many researchers are fighting against it by refusing to submitting papers to them. If I don’t go wrong the anti-Elsevier movement was started within the Mathematics community some years ago and now there’s a website devoted to collecting signatures among researchers who are willing on refraining from contributing their work to the the group [2].
This tweet here summarises the whole issue very neatly, if you follow the link you’ll discover it’s making fun of an Elsevier paper which inserted reviewer’s comments into the text, presumably by mistake:
Reviewer wrangling: $4,000Editor fee: $6,000Copyediting fee: $1,200
Messing it up and inserting reviewer responses into paper: priceless https://t.co/I7Y2C0VfPJ
— Chris Holdgraf (@choldgraf) July 23, 2017
Apart from this, there are several other initiatives oriented at making the publishing process fairer and more in line with the principles of science, which means detatching it from the big sharks of old capitalism. T Gowers, one of the leading academics involved the anti-Elsevier movement, recently published a blog [3] announcing with a bash that a journal has left the Springer publisher to become an independent one. There also start to appear collectives of people setting up new ways to share research, see the Open Academic Search platform [4], which lists the arXiv [5] as one of their resources.
These are all very welcome efforts and might eventually lead to visible change. However, they’re not enough. As well argued in this column on Nature [6], the core of the problem stays. Academia is a rather hierarchical world and also quite resilient to change. As already said, it plays the game of the sharks of publication: these are businesses, and behave as such, but academia as a whole is not really working towards modifying its side of the issue. Publishers are definitely unethical and get all the benefits, but who allows them to do so? The research community itself.
The way academia selects people to merit to be part of it is still based on primarily how much and where you publish. How long will it take for publications on independent journals or even better, digital platforms, provided they are peer-reviewed, to be considered worthy of the same respect that those on old, known names are? How much does it take to realise that the system of evaluation of candidates needs dramatic revision, so to not be based on quantities and locations but purely on quality of work? Should we still wait long to see that all biases in judgements are removed? I still have the ugly impression that despite some efforts of individuals and small groups, the problem stays the same. At the current state of things, academia is also losing its appeal among young and talented indidividuals who believe in meritocracy but refuse to be judged based on numbers and old-fashioned, biased, rich-gets-richer mechanisms. And this is probably the saddest part of all this, which we’re all going to pay for, if it continues.
Is it maybe just a matter of time and we’re on the verge of a substantial shift of paradigm in the way academia works which we’ll live to see in the years to come? Here’s hoping.
Originally published at martinapugliese.github.io on July 28, 2017.
