One of the onerous parts of being a research scientist is the pressure to publish lots of papers, which ranks second only to getting grants as a prime inducer of stress.  To obtain tenure or promotion, young scientists now must publish prolifically.  I remember that Mel Green, one of my mentors as a postdoc at The University of California at Davis, told me that in his day (he’s now in his early nineties, and still pushing flies at the bench), a mere one or two quality publications per year was considered a good output.

No longer.  Today almost nobody stands a chance of getting tenure at a major research institution without at least four or five papers per year, good or not.  Numbers are important.  When we were discussing how the administration at the University of Chicago regarded publications at tenure time, my friend Russ Lande told me, “They may count ’em, and they may weigh ’em, but they won’t read ‘em!”  Young students are pushed to submit their papers to Science or Nature, a sure recipe for disappointment since those journals are so selective.  The pressure also leads to what I see as a destructive level of competition and ambition in young scientists.

My own output has been modest: I have 119 peer-reviewed papers since I started graduate school, which works out to about 3.1 per year.  On the other hand, I do have two books, and pride myself on not gratuitously slapping my name on my students’ papers—one reason why some scientists with big labs can have more than 600 publications in their lifetime!

In Monday’s Guardian, David Colquhoun, a well known pharmacology professor at University College London, a fellow of the Royal Society, science critic, and author of the website Improbable Science, decries the publication frenzy that characterizes modern science.  His essay, “Publish-or-perish: peer review and the corruption of science,” points out how the the publication culture has spawned a number of low-quality “peer reviewed” journals, some of such absymal standards that they’ll publish anything.

Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn’t work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). There simply aren’t enough competent people to do the job. The overwhelming effect of the huge (and unpaid) effort that is put into reviewing papers is to maintain a status hierarchy of journals. Any paper, however bad, can now get published in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed.

Colquhoun gives one example of an infamous paper by a group at Exeter University that studied the medical efficacy of acupuncture.  Despite the finding of at best a tiny effect of the procedure (barely a placebo effect!), the authors—and the journal (The British Journal of General Practice)—trumpeted that acupuncture “resulted in improved health status and wellbeing.”  Have a look at the figures Colquhoun presents to see how “improved” the status really was!  (note that Colquhoun’s column is followed by a response from the study’s authors as well as the journal’s editor, standing by the paper).  But clearly, there are substantial problems with the research, and the results are so unimpressive that they’re hardly an endorsement of acupuncture.

Colquhoun’s solution is self publication:

So what can be done about scientific publishing? The only service the publishers provide is to arrange for reviews and to print the journals. And for this they charge an exorbitant fee, a racket George Monbiot rightly calls “pure rentier capitalism”.

There is an alternative: publish your paper yourself on the web and open the comments. This sort of post-publication review would reduce costs enormously, and the results would be open for anyone to read without paying. It would also destroy the hegemony of half a dozen high-status journals. Everyone wants to publish in Nature, because it’s seen as a passport to promotion and funding. The Nature Publishing Group has cashed in by starting dozens of other journals with Nature in the title.

Interestingly, Colquhoun suggests Mel Green’s formula of “an average of two original papers per year” (and adds that scientists should hold only one research grant at a time, a presciption that I agree with).

An obvious problem is that junior people would be afraid, in the comments section, to criticize more established ones.  Colquhoun suggests that comments can be anonymous: after all, reviewers’ comments in regular journals are not attached to names.  As for worries of fraud because of the lack of peer review, Colquhoun responds:

Deer [Brian Deer, a journalist who exposed Andrew Wakefield’s vaccine/autism fraut] has recently backed a proposal from the House of Commons Science and Technology select committee that an official regulator should be appointed to police science. I don’t think this could work. Is the regulator going to repeat experiments, or even check original data, to make sure all is well? In all probability, a regulator would soon degenerate into yet another box-ticking quango, and end up, like the Quality Assurance Agency, doing more harm than good. The way to improve honesty is to remove official incentives to dishonesty.

By and large, the problem does not arise from outright fraud, which is rare. It arises from official pressure to publish when you have nothing to say.

The last sentence is absolutely on the mark.

Colquhoun’s proposal has substantial merit. What I see as the biggest problem is that it forces tenure and promotion committees, as well as granting agencies. to actually read and evaluate a candidate’s papers, rather than relying on secondary indicators of “quality” like journal “impact factors,” grant dollars, or numbers of publications.   The main impediment to this system is the laziness of university administrations.

h/t: Dom

I’ve always thought that two of the most overpriced things in the world are lattes at places like Starbucks, and the prices of some academic journals.  Most laypeople, whose taxes go to fund scientific research through institutions like the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, aren’t aware that if they want to have access to the results of their largesse—the scientific articles that emanate from that research—they have to pay huge amounts of money.  And some of those journals turn huge profits from the bloated subscription fees and prices for journal articles (the latter can reach more than $50 US to buy and read a single article online!).

In Monday’s Guardian, author George Monbiot reveals the sordid and grasping capitalism of academic publishing in a piece called “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist.”

If you’re a scientist, read and weep: Elsevier, one of the most notorious offenders, turned a profit of 36% last year.  As Monbiot shows, the journals claim that these exorbitant profits reflect the value added by the journal, but that’s hogwash.  Remember that virtually all of the scientific vetting of the papers published is done for free: as a public service by other scientists!  We get nothing for our close scrutiny that decides which papers get published and which are put in the cylindrical file. 

Further, the subscription rates to libraries are often equally exorbitant (though cheaper online): Monbiot notes that a paper library subscription to Biochimica et Biophysica Acta is an astonishing $20,930 per year.  Of course, if you belong to a university that can afford such a subscription, you can get the papers for free, either in the library stacks or online, but that still leaves the layperson—and scholars at the many institutions that can’t afford these subscriptions—out of luck.

Open-access publishing, free for everyone, is a better deal, but it’s still somewhat of a scam, for in many such journals the authors have to pay thousands of dollars in “publication fees” just to get their articles to appear.  Where does that money come from? From taxpayers, for it’s simply taken out of the part of research grants devoted to “publication.” The taxpayer gets the results online free, but also unknowingly foots the bill.

Monbiot’s solution, at least the first part, is eminently sensible.

In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating – along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin’s Freie Universität – a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.

It outrages me as a scientist that I review papers for free (and this often takes an enormous amount of time), while the journals for which I review rake in huge gobbets of cash.  It’s unfair to scientists, and it’s unfair to the taxpayers.  I’m not sure how good a suggestion a single global “publication,” is, though—it would be nearly impossible for a scientist to winnow for good research, for we often direct our attention to those journals known to have stringent quality control and a history of publishing good papers. But at the very least, the public should have low-cost or free access to the research it funds.

Academic publishing is the Starbuck’s latte of science, and the scam has to stop.

h/t: Matthew Cobb