Nobel prize winner declares boycott of major science journals

The British newspaper, The Guardian, reported Dec. 9, 2013 that U.S. physiology/medicine Nobelist Randy Schekman, a biology professor of University of California, Berkeley, has announced that he will boycott publishing in Nature, Cell and Science. Dr. Schekman writes directly to the public about the problem as he sees it, in the pages of The Guardian.

1. The high profile journals are often more interested in improving their "brand" than in forwarding knowledge.

2. Publication in high-profile journals is often used as a proxy for quality when decisions are made about grants, promotion and tenure.

3. In order to pump the brand by increasing the perception of exclusivity, these journals artificially restrict the number of papers they accept.

4. "Impact Factor" has been used as a marketing tool, and in fact, is deeply flawed as a measure of the actual impact of either the journal or the articles it carries. Pursuing the increase in Impact Factor has become a distorting end in itself, affecting acceptance decisions, and other decisions.

5. The factors that go into calculating the Impact Factor, such as number of citations, are not necessarily real measures of the quality of the article. It may simply be eye-catching, provocative or wrong.

6. Editors of these high profile or luxury journals recognize this and often accept article that are poor science simply because they will be highly cited, pumping up the journal's average Impact Factor.

7. Many scientists also recognize the increase in publishability of such articles and are writing more such articles, creating bubbles in fashionable fields, making bold statements that are attractive to such editors. The prevalence of these articles are driving out the doing of more important science and publishing such as replication studies.

8. In extreme cases, Schekman believes that the high-profile journals contribute to researchers cutting corners, with the result that articles are published which must ultimately be retracted. He points to a recent events where the journal

Science alone has recently retracted high-profile papers reporting cloned human embryos, links between littering and violence, and the genetic profiles of centenarians. Perhaps worse, it has not retracted claims that a microbe is able to use arsenic in its DNA instead of phosphorus, despite overwhelming scientific criticism.

Schekman is editing one of the new open access e-journals, which he hopes will help address these problems. He edits eLife, which he says has no artificial caps on the number of articles it will accept. He has a number of scientist editing articles along with him, so that the editorial choices are being made on the quality of the science in the paper, rather than any other criteria. He notes that the journal is currently supported by Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society.

Schekman calls on the decision-making and funding organizations to move away from reliance on the high-profile "luxury" journals as proxies for quality. He admits that the papers that won the Nobel prize were published in such journals. Which gets back to the basic problem in this battle. Unless and until tenure committees truly commit in a reliable way to accepting publication in a journal such as e-Life as the equivalent to publication in Science or Nature or Cell for tenure and promotion decisions, junior faculty will be loathe to follow Schekman in his boycott until they, too, have made their names. The boycott will necessarily be a struggle of senior scientists who have made their names. In a way, that will be good, because these high-profile journals will be damaged by losing such high-profile authors. Yet, the up-coming Nobelists will still be publishing the papers in Cell, Nature and Science that will sooner or later win the their Nobel prizes.

The decoration of the cart before the horse is from a blog post at http://kathieontherun.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/the-high-cost-of-being-well/, a witty post about funding her training for marathons by issuing indulgences for sloth. She does not give any information about where she found the image, which looks old enough to be out of copyright. Also, charming. It reflects my humble opinion that until the academic establishment begins to really support this idea, these boycotts are putting the cart before the horse. But I suppose the establishment won't move its collective fanny without such gestures. We'll see.

Scholars' Journal Boycott: Open Access Rebellion

On January 21, Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers posted on a blog, griping about the publisher Elsevier (and others). He did a very nice job listing the problems that librarians have complained about as consumer issues:

1. It charges very high prices — so far above the average that it seems quite extraordinary that they can get away with it.

2. One method that they have for getting away with it is a practice known as “bundling”, where instead of giving libraries the choice of which journals they want to subscribe to, they offer them the choice between a large collection of journals (chosen by them) or nothing at all. So if some Elsevier journals in the “bundle” are indispensable to a library, that library is forced to subscribe at very high subscription rates to a large number of journals, across all the sciences, many of which they do not want. (The journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a notorious example of a journal that is regarded as a joke by many mathematicians, but which libraries all round the world must nevertheless subscribe to.) Given that libraries have limited budgets, this often means that they cannot subscribe to journals that they would much rather subscribe to, so it is not just libraries that are harmed, but other publishers, which is of course part of the motivation for the scheme.

3. If libraries attempt to negotiate better deals, Elsevier is ruthless about cutting off access to all their journals.

4. Elsevier supports many of the measures, such as the Research Works Act (112 HR 3699), that attempt to stop the move to open access. They also supported SOPA (112 HR 3261) and PIPA (112 S 968) and lobbied strongly for them.

I could carry on, but I’ll leave it there.

Professor Gowers notes that scholars can fight back by refusing to continue editing for, publishing in or doing peer reviews for such journals. He notes that he has stopped doing these things in Elsevier journals and encourages others to do so. I notice that his post has received 31 comments to date, and 83 people have used Google to +1 it, 614 people have shared it on Facebook, and 778 have tweeted it on Twitter, so this is a very hot post.

Gowers wondered if there might be a website where mathematicians who want to boycott Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically. Within a day or two, The Cost of Knowledge appeared, providing just such a website. Scholars from a wide variety of fields (law is not listed, but is subsumed under "social sciences") have signed, and are listed in alphabetical order. Science, math and humanities are all represented. The impressive part is that the protesters pledging to forgo publishing in journals such as The Lancet and Cell, include not just "made" scholars, but tenure track junior scholars, who are truly putting a great deal on the line by joining the protest. As of right now (Feb. 8, 3 PM ) there are 4,713 signatories total on The Cost of Knowledge.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has noted the protest and notes that Elsevier has felt enough pressure to make a statement in response. Librarians who look at the article will not be surprised by any of the justifications from the Elsevier spokeswoman: The steep price increases of the 1980's are a thing of the past and are coloring the perceptions of the problem now. Elsevier claims that it invests a lot in metadata tagging that adds value and links articles together, making research more efficient(and that would not be available if the scholars published their own materials -- UNLESS they worked with librarians!).

The company's support of the Research Works Act is driven by its investment in those products, [the spokeswoman] added: "It's not a disavowal of the National Institutes of Health or of open access. We are just trying to avoid inflexible regulations." The company was the first and largest contributor to PubMed Central, the NIH repository of free, full-text articles,....

Mr. Gowers, ... told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one another's papers on open Web sites. "That would be far cheaper than anything a commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective," he noted.

Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr. Abrahams. "It could disappear tomorrow, and I'd never notice that it's gone," he said.

If I were Elsevier, and other, similar journal publishers, I think I would be worrying a bit.

Writing for Impact

I have a student this semester, who wants to write an article, not because he's on a journal staff, or because he is getting credit for a directed study with me. He wrote a research guide last semester on a topic that was near to his heart, and he wants to follow it up. He's doing it on his own time. I don't know if a law student has any hope of getting a journal article published in this situation.... It seems like a pretty long shot to put something like that in any law review, even our own school law journals, but especially going outside. Student-edited journals have big gates that do look at who you are, and where you are from. This has long been a frustration to law professors at 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier law schools who run into these same barriers trying to publish their scholarship. The students don't have a lot of experience judging scholarship, so they often use who and where as proxies for quality when they choose articles to publish.

Well. That's one big reason I have long shied away from publishing in law reviews. I have always chosen to send my stuff to professionally edited or peer-reviewed journals. I think I get a much better review, and I also have a much better chance of getting published, no matter where I have chosen to work.

So, I am trying to persuade this student that perhaps there is publishing beyond law reviews. That perhaps he will have a better chance of getting a well-written article published in a journal beyond the law journal universe. Law students (and I was this way, I think, when I was in law school), believe that there is no intelligent life outside of law school. This makes it extra ironic that other university faculty and PhD students often look down their noses at the law school publication system that sets up our ground-level students as the gatekeepers of our scholarship!

In service of my argument, I am trying to introduce this fellow to the concept of "journal impact factor" which is a measure based on average citation rates of the articles in the journal. So, for instance, a frequently cited journal like Nature would have a higher journal impact factor than a less frequently cited journal. It does not mean that individual articles in each issue have been cited particularly, but that, on average, articles in this journal, are cited more often. Journals advertise their impact factors to potential authors, interestingly. "Publish with us! Our impact factor is higher." As if it were going to guarantee more citations for the article you publish with them. And perhaps it does deliver more eyeballs, and potentially more citations... but nobody knows. Journal impact factor is a sort of blunt instrument measure, especially to those of us in law, who have luxuriated in the fine detail of Shepards and KeyCite citators, which not only tell us how many citations something has, but how they are being treated, and often what is being discussed. Still, journal impact factor is more information on the publication level than is available about law reviews at the publication level.

Now, there is an interesting new addition to impact measurements. Altmetrics is not designed to take the place of e of journal impact factor. It is designed to complement it, to add nuance to it and reach beyond it to publication in social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. I think it will be a very interesting new feature. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about Altmetrics. There is a varied group of academics working on the idea, but among them is the group at altmetrics.org which has published a manifesto. This includes academics in library science, computer science, somebody from the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and somebody from Wikimedia Foundation, which is related to Wikipedia.

This is obviously going to have more immediate impact in the sciences, where open source publishing already has a toehold (PLOS, for instance is really moving forward with Altmetrics already, apparently). But we in law librarianship are working on open source publishing in our own backyards. And now I have my own personal project. I hope I can persuade this student to try publishing somewhere other than his round peg law review default. Because his square peg article is not going to be a very good fit, I fear!