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.
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!
I was about to mention PCI, but glad to see you already have, Pavithran! And this is the first I've heard of Arcadia, seems interesting - I have many questions about their approach, but modular publishing seems like a good step. https://www.researchequals.com/ are building a general-purpose platform for modular publishing as well.
Thanks! Yes, I know Research Equals and in that case, you would also be interested in Octopus, funded by the UKRI (https://www.octopus.ac/). Along with Arcadia, only these two work on modular publishing, to my knowledge.
I have no expertise on the landscape of scientific publishing, but the open access question cuts across disciplines. The Modern Language Association, to its credit, has made its Job List free (it once required a membership). But as I discovered while researching a recent piece for The Chronicle, there is a lot of paywalled research content out there that an independent scholar can't access. This doesn't promote knowledge, it hides it behind institutional walls. Thankfully, I was able to access all of the information I needed by emailing the editors and authors directly and explaining my plight as a freelance writer. But that is not how it should be.
On a related note, the whole structure of peer review, which has required a great deal of pro bono work, is now crumbling beneath a crisis of purpose. People are reasonably asking to be compensated for their labor, and it's becoming increasingly more difficult to find reviewers. All of this threatens the integrity of knowledge.
Agreed on both accounts. The issue of getting reviewers is a huge one, and makes being an editor extra challenging. It got exponentially harder during/after the pandemic and I think “a crisis of purpose” is exactly right.
Two thoughts on publications. By way of context, I’m a professor at a land grant university, and part of my job is developing new plant varieties. 1. Over time I’ve grown frustrated by how publications are viewed by many of my colleagues not only as sufficient but also as the only appropriate measure of “impact”, while simultaneously dismissing the real-world impact of new cultivars that farmers grow and we all eat daily. I consider publications to be imperfect proxies for impact – and rue the day that “counting publications” became the way that so many of us are evaluated. IMO there is a lot of echo chamber activity, where scientists act as if scientists alone can judge the impact of our research. As a result we publish to serve ourselves, not the citizens who fund us. Although impact outside the academy is granted considerable lip service, in practice it is often looked down upon. 2. The incessant pressure to publish has created so much noise that it can hinder progress. I can’t count the number of times I’ve reviewed articles in my domain where the authors don’t appear to be aware of literature in “prestigious journals” that, had they known about, would have profoundly reshaped the experiments they conducted or how they wrote their manuscript. We publish assuming others will build upon our work. But if others struggle to find our work in the sea of journals that exist nowadays – publications may not be as valuable as we assume.
What important points! As a basic biologist, it's been easy for me to lose track of the original reason to publish, but I agree that it can be true for those who justify their research as applied as well. "Getting the information out there" often stops at publication and many scientists don't feel further obligation!
Regarding the point about authors being unaware--this brings up a point I was discussing with a friend offline. How much are people really reading the literature anymore? I mean reading the whole paper. I certainly haven't read more than a few papers all the way through, usually I just scan the figures. What does this say about the format that we are using, and all the time put into words and conclusions that are read by so few?!
Great article! I think one of the key reasons journals have continued to maintain such important gatekeeper status and "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" of quality (besides inertia and "the way its always been") is the issue of TRUST. As you mention, there is nowhere NEAR enough time for hiring and promotion committees to read through the published body of work of current and prospective faculty members, so everyone relies on heuristics. "Well, its published in Nature/Cell/Science, and that's pretty rigorous" (setting aside the issues with those in the Seeds of Science article you link). No faculty member wants to put their work in a place where few will see it and no one with the Right CredentialsTM has deemed it Important.
I am a big believer in open access publishing, I love tweaks journals like BMC and Frontiers are doing with open/collaborative PEER REVIEW (reviewers names and verbatim comments are available alongside the manuscript), and eLife moving to reviewed pre-prints. That said, one big issue is separating out the legitimate open access platforms from cash-grab scam journals. And the distinction is not always black and white, there are some publishers where they fall somewhere in the middle. I've published in a few legitimate open-access journals, but I did a ton of due diligence first, and even then, I was a little worried how they would be perceived.
For any replacement system, we have to solve for the problem of trust or none of the stakeholders with money and careers on the line will get behind it.
One solution to trust is post-publication peer review, but this only works in fields where there is a lot of interest. We’ve put every manuscript up on BioRxiV but never got a review or comment--even for manuscripts that ended up in relatively high impact journals.
Scientific publishing is a pure business run by private equity (https://www.ft.com/content/537ee5cc-2a74-4397-bdfb-4d846e6b8200) except few. In this business the creators (authors) are the consumers (readers). Unlike other such businesses, here the creator pays for its creation and again pays for consumption. The question is does science need to be controlled by such a business? What are the alternatives?
That is really discouraging to hear. It isn't something I have thought about for a very long time. We used to include the names of our undergraduate and graduate students in publications, but now I wonder whether having them know how the sausage is made would drive off those who were raised on the more idealistic picture of what academic life was all about.
On balance, I think it’s best to get trainees onto papers as early as possible, so they see the realities of the situation and know what they are getting into—and don’t take it too seriously!
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!
I was about to mention PCI, but glad to see you already have, Pavithran! And this is the first I've heard of Arcadia, seems interesting - I have many questions about their approach, but modular publishing seems like a good step. https://www.researchequals.com/ are building a general-purpose platform for modular publishing as well.
Thanks! Yes, I know Research Equals and in that case, you would also be interested in Octopus, funded by the UKRI (https://www.octopus.ac/). Along with Arcadia, only these two work on modular publishing, to my knowledge.
I have no expertise on the landscape of scientific publishing, but the open access question cuts across disciplines. The Modern Language Association, to its credit, has made its Job List free (it once required a membership). But as I discovered while researching a recent piece for The Chronicle, there is a lot of paywalled research content out there that an independent scholar can't access. This doesn't promote knowledge, it hides it behind institutional walls. Thankfully, I was able to access all of the information I needed by emailing the editors and authors directly and explaining my plight as a freelance writer. But that is not how it should be.
On a related note, the whole structure of peer review, which has required a great deal of pro bono work, is now crumbling beneath a crisis of purpose. People are reasonably asking to be compensated for their labor, and it's becoming increasingly more difficult to find reviewers. All of this threatens the integrity of knowledge.
Agreed on both accounts. The issue of getting reviewers is a huge one, and makes being an editor extra challenging. It got exponentially harder during/after the pandemic and I think “a crisis of purpose” is exactly right.
Two thoughts on publications. By way of context, I’m a professor at a land grant university, and part of my job is developing new plant varieties. 1. Over time I’ve grown frustrated by how publications are viewed by many of my colleagues not only as sufficient but also as the only appropriate measure of “impact”, while simultaneously dismissing the real-world impact of new cultivars that farmers grow and we all eat daily. I consider publications to be imperfect proxies for impact – and rue the day that “counting publications” became the way that so many of us are evaluated. IMO there is a lot of echo chamber activity, where scientists act as if scientists alone can judge the impact of our research. As a result we publish to serve ourselves, not the citizens who fund us. Although impact outside the academy is granted considerable lip service, in practice it is often looked down upon. 2. The incessant pressure to publish has created so much noise that it can hinder progress. I can’t count the number of times I’ve reviewed articles in my domain where the authors don’t appear to be aware of literature in “prestigious journals” that, had they known about, would have profoundly reshaped the experiments they conducted or how they wrote their manuscript. We publish assuming others will build upon our work. But if others struggle to find our work in the sea of journals that exist nowadays – publications may not be as valuable as we assume.
What important points! As a basic biologist, it's been easy for me to lose track of the original reason to publish, but I agree that it can be true for those who justify their research as applied as well. "Getting the information out there" often stops at publication and many scientists don't feel further obligation!
Regarding the point about authors being unaware--this brings up a point I was discussing with a friend offline. How much are people really reading the literature anymore? I mean reading the whole paper. I certainly haven't read more than a few papers all the way through, usually I just scan the figures. What does this say about the format that we are using, and all the time put into words and conclusions that are read by so few?!
Great article! I think one of the key reasons journals have continued to maintain such important gatekeeper status and "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" of quality (besides inertia and "the way its always been") is the issue of TRUST. As you mention, there is nowhere NEAR enough time for hiring and promotion committees to read through the published body of work of current and prospective faculty members, so everyone relies on heuristics. "Well, its published in Nature/Cell/Science, and that's pretty rigorous" (setting aside the issues with those in the Seeds of Science article you link). No faculty member wants to put their work in a place where few will see it and no one with the Right CredentialsTM has deemed it Important.
I am a big believer in open access publishing, I love tweaks journals like BMC and Frontiers are doing with open/collaborative PEER REVIEW (reviewers names and verbatim comments are available alongside the manuscript), and eLife moving to reviewed pre-prints. That said, one big issue is separating out the legitimate open access platforms from cash-grab scam journals. And the distinction is not always black and white, there are some publishers where they fall somewhere in the middle. I've published in a few legitimate open-access journals, but I did a ton of due diligence first, and even then, I was a little worried how they would be perceived.
For any replacement system, we have to solve for the problem of trust or none of the stakeholders with money and careers on the line will get behind it.
One solution to trust is post-publication peer review, but this only works in fields where there is a lot of interest. We’ve put every manuscript up on BioRxiV but never got a review or comment--even for manuscripts that ended up in relatively high impact journals.
Scientific publishing is a pure business run by private equity (https://www.ft.com/content/537ee5cc-2a74-4397-bdfb-4d846e6b8200) except few. In this business the creators (authors) are the consumers (readers). Unlike other such businesses, here the creator pays for its creation and again pays for consumption. The question is does science need to be controlled by such a business? What are the alternatives?
That is really discouraging to hear. It isn't something I have thought about for a very long time. We used to include the names of our undergraduate and graduate students in publications, but now I wonder whether having them know how the sausage is made would drive off those who were raised on the more idealistic picture of what academic life was all about.
On balance, I think it’s best to get trainees onto papers as early as possible, so they see the realities of the situation and know what they are getting into—and don’t take it too seriously!