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.

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!

On Being Faculty -- Thoughts on tenure After AALS

Law school library directors have a distinctive additional role in their profession. Many (I think, most), are members of the law school faculty as well as being librarians. Very few other librarians are full-fledged members of the faculty they serve. This was the origin of academic librarians, long ago, when the librarian was an equal among a group of scholars. We might ask why only this one narrow type of librarian still has that status. Why not offer faculty status to non-directors who meet standards? Why not consider if medical librarians should be part of medical school faculties? And so forth, reconsidering librarians as members of the faculty through all the academic libraries.

Why is the existing status of law school library directors as full members of their faculties being challenged now? It is tempting just to excoriate the ALDA deans as enemies of faculty diversity and possibly of faculty governance generally, with the "weak links" of clinicians, writing faculty and librarians as just the leading wedge of their general attack on tenure for all faculty. But there are some more subtle and thought-provoking reasons we should discuss.

In recent times, there have been several high-profile law library directors who, because of tenure, could not be fired from their positions. Their stories vary widely, but all offer food for uncomfortable self-reflection. There have been instances of directors who did not do their job, did it badly, did not get on with faculty and deans. These individuals, having been tenured to the full faculty, could be removed from the library but not from the faculty without great uproar. We should curse those who, by selfishly holding onto a tenured position without doing the work demanded by it, have made faculty and deans alike consider whether they want to tenure future library directors at all, or just as librarians, not law faculty. BUT consider, how rarely these problems arise with a tenured director of law libraries. Consider, by contrast, how many members of your law school's substantive faculty stopped producing, caring about students or law school service once they received tenure. The faculty tenure problem is MUCH more common. It is not rational for librarians to be singled out for this attack! It is, however, much less dangerous, as there is a smaller group, and it may be easy for substantive colleagues to dismiss the attack on tenure if it begins with outlier populations like librarians, clinicians and writing faculty.


The issue of problematic tenure is more complicated than malfeasance in a few instances. Bernie Reams, for instance, may be misunderstood to belong in the first category. I have been informed, however, by a former colleague that Bernie's problems arose from challenging an abusive dean. Here is the story as told me, and as best as I can verify, it seems true: Bernie wanted to teach in the school's over-seas program. He was told by the dean he could not participate as he was the librarian. Bernie then told the dean he would resign as librarian, and continue as tenured faculty member. I think this is a good example of why faculty cherish tenure. It frees one from fear of this sort of managerial abuse. It frees you to be creative in your research, in your teaching and in your management of the library. When it works correctly, tenure gives the faculty wings, not a shell.

This sort of power to challenge a dean is what may be the crux of the ALDA deans' attack on tenure. It is certainly inconvenient to have to negotiate with faculty rather than mandate. It may interfere with the dean's plans. But the balance of power between faculty members, (and law librarians) and their deans is a crucial one in American legal education.

The dean-faculty balance of power is becoming more important now than before. There is a class of professional deans developing, who move from school to school, rarely remaining as permanent members of a faculty after their deanships. This development is undoubtedly driven by the increased demands and complexity of deaning. There is a learning curve to being a dean, like everything else, and just being a faculty member does not do very much to prepare a brilliant teacher for the very different demands of deaning. I do not object to the peripatetic professional deans. But consider the difference in judgement, commitment and experience to a school between a faculty member (or librarian) who is there for 15-35 years or more compared to that of a portable, fungible professional dean. There is a great breadth of experience in the professional dean, having seen many different schools, and developed a specialized set of skills. But there is a great depth of experience in long-time members of the law school community. A modern law school needs both types of experience, and both groups need a balanced share of decision-making in the school.