Down with the tyrants!
Nobel laureate announced a boycott of leading scientific journals
Dmitry Tselikov, Compulenta
Leading scientific journals interfere with the scientific process. These are the "tyrants" who need to be thrown off the throne!
This is how the American biologist Randy Shekman, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in Stockholm yesterday, spoke out when announcing the boycott. His laboratory will no longer send articles to the renowned and legendary journals Nature, Cell and Science.
According to him, the desire to see their work in an "elite" magazine encourages researchers to cut corners and do what is considered fashionable, and not what is more important for science. The problem, he says, is also that editors have never been scientists: they are professionals exclusively in publishing, who are primarily interested in hype, sensation, furor.
Randy Shekman is the editor-in-chief of a free-access online scientific journal.
Perhaps this is the reason for the sharpness of the demarche.
"I am a scientist," Mr. Shekman writes in the British Guardian (How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science). – My world is a world of professionals who do a great thing in the interests of humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives. It is dominated by structures that encourage the pursuit of personal reputation and promotion, and therefore the one who takes on the most fashionable job gets the greatest reward, not the one who works the best. Those of us who follow these incentives think quite reasonably (I have followed them myself), but do not always serve the best interests of our profession, not to mention the interests of humanity and society.
We all know what perverse incentives have done in the financial and banking sector. The only difference is that my colleagues and I do not receive huge cash prizes, but professional awards based on the results of publications in prestigious journals: mainly Nature, Cell and Science.
These elite magazines should be the epitome of quality, publish only the best. Since funding organizations and departments that make personnel decisions see these journals as a litmus test of science, appearing on their pages increases your chances of a grant and a professorship. But the reputation of big magazines is not entirely deserved. Although they publish many outstanding works, this is far from the only thing they publish. In addition, they are not the only ones who give way to outstanding research.
These magazines are scrupulous about their brands, caring more about subscriptions than about stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who produce bags and suits in limited editions, they know that the shortage heats up demand, so they artificially reduce the number of accepted works. Then, to advertise exclusive brands, a trick called the "impact factor" is done: it measures how many times articles published in this journal are cited in subsequent studies. The better the article, we are told, the more often it is cited, so the best journals get the highest rating. Nevertheless, this is a deeply erroneous measure, the service of which has become an end in itself. In fact, this is as much a blow to science as the practice of bonuses is to the banking sector.
The average rating of the magazine says nothing about the quality of an individual article. In addition, quoting is not always related to quality. The article can be widely cited not only because it is a good science, but also because it is on a fashionable topic, provocative or erroneous. Editors of luxury magazines understand this perfectly well, so they accept articles that can make a fuss by addressing a hot topic or ambiguous statements. As a result, scientists are starting to blow bubbles instead of more important and modest work – for example, instead of trying to reproduce research.
In extreme cases, the temptation to get into the elite forces you to cut corners, that is, to make mistakes and deceive. For example, the journal Science has recently withdrawn a number of sensational articles about the cloning of human embryos, the correlation between garbage and violence, as well as the genetic profiles of centenarians. Even worse, he has not yet withdrawn the work that claimed that arsenic can be used instead of phosphorus in the DNA of microorganisms, despite all the scientific criticism of this statement."
Mr. Shekman, despite all of the above, is full of optimism. The future, he believes, belongs to "a new breed of open-access magazines that do not have the task of selling an expensive subscription." "Born on the Internet, they can accept any number of articles, as long as they meet quality standards," the Nobel laureate writes. "Many of them are edited by scientists who are able to assess the value of the work without taking into account the citation index."
Mr. Shekman recalls that he himself works in the magazine eLife, which is published by the British charity foundation Wellcome Trust (UK), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA) and the Max Planck Society (Germany). According to him, the publication publishes "world-class science" every week.
"Sponsors and universities could also play a positive role," the scientist continues. – They should tell the committees that distribute grants and positions that it is not worth judging articles by where they are published. The quality of science, not the brand of the magazine, is what matters. Most importantly, we scientists must take action. Like many other successful researchers, I have published several papers on the pages of major brands, and among them were those that allowed me to become a Nobel Prize winner in Medicine. But it won't happen again. My lab will ignore elite journals from now on, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.
Just as Wall Street must break the shackles of a bonus culture that is rational for individuals but harmful to the financial system as a whole, science must overthrow the tyranny of elite magazines."
It is difficult to disagree with Mr. Shekman. As the Guardian journalist emphasizes in the accompanying material, the prestige bestowed by major journals led, for example, to the fact that the Chinese Academy of Sciences began to pay the equivalent of $30 thousand to the most successful authors.
Postdoc Daniel Sirkis from Mr. Shekman's laboratory agrees with his supervisor: scientists spend a lot of time getting their work published by Cell, Science or Nature. "Yes, it will be difficult for me to get into certain elite institutions without articles in these journals, but I don't think I would like to do science where the place of publication is an important criterion for hiring," says Mr. Sirkis.
Biochemist Sebastian Springer from Jacobs University (Germany), who worked with Mr. Shekman at the University of California at Berkeley (USA), also does not consider the system meritocratic (from Latin meritus worthy and Greek kratos power - VM). Indeed, he says, magazine editors value novelty more than quality of work. And not all the best articles are published on the pages of these publications. However, according to Mr. Springer, there is no better system yet.
The editor-in-chief of the journal Nature, Philip Campbell, disclaims all responsibility, and he has the right to do so. This year, a survey conducted by the Nature publishing group among 20 thousand scientists showed that when choosing the place of publication, researchers take into account first of all the reputation of the journal, the relevance of its content for this scientific discipline and the impact factor. Indeed, scientists themselves need to decide what they want to do – science or career. And then complain about the editorial policy of some magazines.
Prepared by The Guardian: Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journalsPortal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru