Current biases and trends in scientific journalism. Study from a sample of Nature articles:
"we found a skew toward quoting men in Nature science journalism. However, quotation is trending toward equal representation at a faster rate than authorship rates in academic publishing. Gender disparity in Nature quotes was dependent on the article type. We found a significant over-representation of names with predicted Celtic/English origin and under-representation of names with a predicted East Asian origin in both in extracted quotes and journal citations but dampened in citations."
There must be an easier way to work with review/submission websites.
One registers a master password with the publisher that works for all journals. Every time an account is created with a new journal of this publisher, the master password is linked to it and one could start right away @academicchatter#ScientificPublishing
Is there a comprehensive archive, with references, of Elsevier's many sins against scientific progress? @albertcardona@brembs The lead authors of a paper I played a small role in want to submit to Cell 🤢 and I would like to dissuade them.
Follow-up Q: I have a vague vibe that, although the entire traditional publishing system needs to die in a fire, NPG are not quite as scummy as Elsie. Is that vibe justified or not really?
If given the amount of data out there on #RELX (and Springer Nature) the authors remain intent on submitting to their journals, there’s not much you can do. At this point throwing data at such authors doesn’t work anymore. Instead, you could try telling them about Robert Maxwell https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science , about how journals don’t have to be expensive to be respectable https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ and drop some shade, with comments like “do you think your grant funder will be happy to see the work published there?”. It’s not like they don’t know – they can’t not know –, it’s that they are still calculating impact towards career advancement as a function of journal impact factor. And sadly, for many institutions, they aren’t wrong.
At least try to get them to send to Science or PNAS, which are meant to be societies for scientists rather than an unapologetically exploitative business.
Now imagine that Harvard departments stated that unless their faculty publishes there instead of in the usual glamour journals, they won't get tenure or be allowed to apply for grants.
Now wouldn't that bring about change immediately. And lots of shouting. Ultimately, what glamour journals can do, and could do very well, is write short summaries of papers for broad consumption. Not publish the original works.
So what would it take to publish a paper here on mastodon and do public peer review? Just an agreement to use a few hashtags like #Paper, and in replies things like #PeerReview, #Accept, #Revise, #Reject? Some automatically generated web and pdf output summarising the thread? Submission to something like Zenodo to give a DOI? Linking user accounts to orcid to verify identity? Only real problem I see is that even with markdown and LaTeX, Mastodon posts are not well suited for longer posts with multiple figures etc. Maybe fine for short results though?
"Sorbonne University—which discontinued its subscription to the Web of Science last year and switched to a newer, open platform called OpenAlex—said in a statement that “by signing the Declaration, we want to show that not only this move towards open research information should be an objective, but that it can be done.”"
In this time and age there's no reason whatsoever to use Web of Science or Scopus. Besides the fact that open alternatives exist like OpenAlex, using citations metrics or journal impact factors for recruitment or promotions is simply wrong, and a great signal for prospective applicants: if an institution uses them, run, don't apply. Find one that values and understands your work instead.
“I haven’t been bitten by Google killing an app or service since Google Reader, because I never again trusted them.”
👆 this.
(Also note: I am aware of Gruber’s terrible takes on the EU, and Threads, and a bunch of other stuff. But on this he is spot on. The Google Graveyard is so damaging to Google’s brand, it’s astonishing to me that (a) anyone still uses Google products, and (b) the execs still kill stuff rather than keeping it on life support just for reputation.) https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/112204358739653554
If you search by author instead (notice the pulldown menu to the left of the search bar at the top), then you can visit an author's page, and see bibliometrics – like in Google Scholar. Myself: https://openalex.org/authors/a5042603640
Signing up to OpenAlex lets you automate alerts and save searches.
The Scholar Archive is more alike Google Scholar in layout, listing links to publishers and to PDFs, but more dependent (relative to OpenAlex) on typing in keywords into the search box. Again, myself for Drosophila: https://scholar.archive.org/search?q=Albert+Cardona+Drosophila
Underneath, it uses the fatcat wiki.
That's the paper that introduced the #Transformer architecture, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions to achieve much faster training times and higher performance in a language task.
It's on us to stop using them. At some point, we should start considering it a liability to publish on a legacy publisher: as in, the author is found lacking in collegiality. In its present form, it ought to be a negative [1]. To date, it still isn't.
It really is up to funder's grant panels and department's search and promotion committees. And the members of these panels are us.
[1] The only possible future for legacy publishers is to go back to the past, when a lengthy, detailed paper was published in e.g., the Journal of Neurophysiology, and a brief summary was sent to e.g., Nature for broad distribution beyond the immediate field of research.
On @eLife , the article falls very short: at #eLife we've been publishing Reviewed Preprints at the same rate that we were publishing "traditional" articles before. See:
> [P]osting unreviewed research on a preprint server is not new or controversial [...] But palaeoanthropology is not a field that needs urgent research and rapid breakthroughs. Given the huge and wide public interest in human evolution and our origins, this research field benefits from much slower, measured, and careful research.
Speaking for myself as a senior editor and reviewing editor for eLife, the first section I read of an incoming manuscript is the Methods. If these aren't spelled out clearly and detailed enough, I return the manuscript to the authors.
Second, whether a manuscript is sent out for review, beyond appraisal by a consultation with multiple reviewing editors (which can go on for some time; all are practising scientists), is very much a function of whether there is a reviewing editor willing to take it on and with the time to do so.
Generalising across the whole board is difficult – we are all practicing scientists with many other duties.
The remarkable news to me is that a journal run by practising scientists without a conflict of interest regarding the need to accept papers to get paid or the need to filter out papers to retain a flair of exclusivity can do as well as eLife does.
The author argues that the third model [post-publication (peer) review (including preprints (peer) review)] offers the best way to implement the main functions of scientific communication.
"Evolution of Peer Review in Scientific Communication"
The problem of #ScientificPublishing reminds me of the old problem of which car should people buy. People buy the car they think they want – pressured by ads, peers, real or imaginary advantages of each choice, society at large –, not the want they need. Often they don't need a car at all.
At this point we academics know what model of scientific publishing is actually helpful at getting more accurate reports out and reach everyone who wants or need to read them. The question is how to get from where we are to where we want to be. How do we get the incentives right, who is the first mover – and thus risks the most –, whether funders or academic institutions, or individuals. How we disentangle publication from funding and career advancement. And so on. We need an actual plan.
I figure there're multiple answers, likely also conflated with conference proceedings or even one could argue the first issue of Phil Trans B (1665). But hit me with your impression of "the oldest special issue" in #ScientificPublishing ?
Another Elsevier paper with obvious AI-written text.
“In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I'm very sorry, but I don't have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model.”
If the authors couldn't be bothered to read it, one wonders why would anyone be. The paper, then, is no longer published to be read, but to be a token of academic promotion. Changing the incentives that led to this outcome is getting urgent.
We were surprised by a recent #Frontiers
blog. They make derogatory statements, accuse us of data manipulation & mischaracterize our comms with them. 😔
Nobody comes out of it well, but Nature are much more transparent about the editorial process than I can ever remember. (It's a little unclear if that was spontaneous, but, if not, the frequently claimed independence of Nature News came good.)
Key issue is the system itself: publish a paper and pretend it's the ultimate truth on the matter. A system shift is needed to negate that assumption on published papers, and to instead more humbly publish results as the latest take on the matter, correct or not but hopefully constructive and insightful. A first step to that end is to stop using papers as tokens of academic currency weighted by the publication venue and for any evaluators to start reading the papers.
Good to see the Journal of Neuroscience move on to open peer review. 6 months in, would be interesting to know the opt-out rate for authors and for reviewers.
Regarding publication costs, indeed the ~$6000 seems excessive; it’s 3x the cost of publishing in eLife, for example.