Do publications have to be the currency of science?
Starting a new series on the internal economics of scientific publishing
“Publications are the currency of science” is one of the most oft-repeated statements in academic life sciences, coming in just after “mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell,” and just before “plants are sessile”. Those who say it (including me) are not wrong: we all trade publications for fellowships, jobs, grants, and tenure. While not the only factor, the quantity and perceived quality of your publications in large part determines your buying power in the current academic economy.
What ARE the costs of publishing?
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to extend this academic-publishing-as-pure-capitalism metaphor a bit further. As a Biology professor at an R1, publications were some of the most expensive things on my CV—pricy in terms of grant money, in terms of my very limited time, and in terms of trainee effort and mental health. All three of these aspects have been subject to inflation in recent years.
The monetary cost of publishing a single paper in a journal is now several thousands of dollars—and might be double that if you want your paper to be open access. Which many of us do. (Open access means that anyone can read it, rather than just paid subscribers to that journal. It doesn’t cost the publishing company anything, and ends up making them record profits).
This part of the economics of publishing is extremely stupid, and I have little to add that hasn’t already been discussed elsewhere: a recent post by The Seeds of Science called PNAS is Not a Good Journal discusses the problems with judging papers by journal impact factor. The good news is that people are working to change these dynamics. Time for a Change covers some of the many exciting innovations happening right now in the publishing space.
The bureaucratic time put into old-timey journal publishing is also on the rise. As Arjun Raj in an interview with The Good Science Project said:
. . . publishing a paper now is accompanied by literally weeks of paperwork and uploading and so forth. The problem is, of course, that there is little counterweight to adding a new form—typically it costs nothing to those who administer them, even if it costs researchers lots of increasingly valuable time.
It’s not just additional forms that take up time. It’s also all the little new ways that journals ask you to promote and explain your own work. It’s not just an abstract, it’s a short blurb, a long blurb, a graphical abstract, a short video, and don’t forget to promote it on social media! Typically, journals don’t help with any of this, it’s up to the authors to create free additional content for the journal (just like we do free peer review for the journal).
And there are other costs to our current system of “publishing as scientific currency”, especially for trainees. Many—probably most—PhD programs require students to submit a complete paper before graduating. This can be especially challenging if initial projects didn’t pan out, if the student struggled with focus during their training (common during the pandemic), or if a project simply didn’t have an outcome considered exciting enough to their PI. Even if a student’s project goes well, they might still find their hard work of 5 years reduced to “incremental” by reviewer #3. Harsh words from reviewers and editors (and PIs) in the name of upholding scientific standards can be extremely painful and can alter a student’s self-image and career trajectory. This is academic science at its most extractive.
Why can’t discovery be the currency of science?
I’ve wondered if we could move towards “discoveries are the currency of science”, or “inquiry is the currency of science”, or even “reproducibility”? It seems better to focus on the science rather than the performance of science, especially when evaluating each other. But, of course, who decides what is a discovery and what is just expanding on someone else’s discovery? How do we know which discoveries are most exciting, especially in areas that aren’t our expertise? And don’t we owe it to everyone else to make public what we discover?
Finally, I find it hard to imagine a system where some kind of shortcut, or proxy, for the quality, impact, originality, and depth of our work isn’t necessary. It’s simply not possible for a faculty member on a search committee to read and effectively evaluate the papers of 100 applicants to a job position—even 20 applicants is asking a lot both time-wise and expertise-wise from people who don’t have any extra time.
What do stories do academic scientists tell ourselves about publishing?
While I’m definitely interested in the systemic crap that makes being a faculty member so annoying, here on Unprofessoring I’m EXTRA interested in our internal stories about this systemic crap. What do we tell ourselves about publishing?
I myself have a fairly complicated relationship with scientific publishing, one that is neither consistent nor logical. Over the next few newsletters, I will dig into the ways I have internalized various attitudes about publication, how these attitudes changed with time, reflection and career advancement, and how it all influenced my relationship with academia. I’ll summarize my experiences as a young author, as a senior author, and as a journal editor—and go on to discuss other related questions and issues around scientific publishing (is it science if it’s not published?).
I hope you’ll read along and join in the discussion!
Discussion Section
Why can’t discovery be the currency of academic science?
What do stories do academic scientists tell ourselves about publishing?
I think you are right about researchers’ attitudes changing. Mine certainly has, over the past 15 years, and I’ll talk about that in future posts. Even old dogs like me can change our thinking!
And I do hope the Arcadia experiment works! We’ll never know what’s possible if we don’t try.
Thanks for this post, Liz!
I would like to see this in two parts. One, I think the attitude and approach of researchers towards publishing is changing and it is quite apparent. We have come a long way from the subscription journals to open access and the emphasis now is on, quite rightly, open science. Consider for example, Peer Community In (https://peercommunityin.org/), for which I am currently volunteering. It was conceived and funded by the French publicly-funded institute, INRAE, to try & open up science. Imagine a public institute putting money and resources, and three full-time researchers closing down their labs to work for an initiative that doesn't directly benefit them. I think this attitudinal change has now caught up and might go a long way in infusing fresh blood into the system.
Secondly, we are now at a critical juncture, where we ask, "what is publishing?". In addition to opening up research work published in the conventional way (as a journal article or preprint), people are coming up with ways to rethink the very concept of publishing. Take, for instance, the case of Arcadia Science (https://www.arcadiascience.com/). This biotech company's cardinal policy is not to publish their work in journals/repositories but to put it out 'incrementally' on their own platform. This includes everything from ideas and hypotheses to (incremental) results. Consequentially (& most importantly), their none of their work will be peer-reviewed conventionally and they seek to validate their work through other people "reusing/reproducing" them. I envision a future where their approach, at least in parts, gets translated into the academic system. Time will tell how much of a difference this would make in the way academic research is done, but I see this as a groundbreaking move, which we might have never seen before!