On Nov 18, 2010, at 11:18, James Stroud wrote:
The future of publishing will be
(1) Publish your own work
(2) Peer review by the entire community
Although I have been remarkably bad at predicting the future, I
still like
attempting to do so ...!
This will not happen ...! ;-)
To be honest, I am not even sure its a great idea ...
Let me outline what I think are problems of peer review:
1. 'review by last author name'. Very often the last author is well
known, or a friend, and the reviewers' critical judgement takes a
temporary
leave of abesnse.
2. 'preferred reviewers'. a double edged sword .. think about it.
3. too much power of decision on editors (professional or academic)
being
able to reject papers without peer-review in many journals.
4. Bad refereeing - sometimes I wonder if people read the paper.
5. Lack of referee expertise: you get papers these days with: a
structure,
some biochemistry, some SAXS, some biophysics, and a cell based
assay. Two
or three people being
able to pick up all the mistakes is very unlikely.
Having outlines these, I can see ways that all can be amplified if
you just
publish all your work, and anybody can comment on it:
Pairing to the above problems, you just amplify them:
1. Even more tempting to earn brownie points online!
2. you can ask your friends or I can ask your enemies to review
3. the other way around: far too many things out... how to filter ?
4. Lack of 'obligation', or even fear to make yourself look like a
fool to
the editors, will make commenting even more sloppy
5. People that think they are experts dwell on meaningless
technicalities.
Peer review is like democracy, its the worst publication system we
can have,
except the ones that have been tried or suggested ...
A.
(3) Citation = Link
#3 makes it work.
Give it 25 years. The journals won't be in the position to lobby
lawmakers
to prevent this trend if we make sure the journals die so slowly
that they
don't realize it.
James
On Nov 18, 2010, at 1:14 AM, John R Helliwell wrote:
Dear Jacob,
Your posting reminds me of a Research Information Network
Conference I
went to in 2006 in London.
Your views coincide with a presenter there, Peter Mika.
His talk can be found at:-
http://www.rin.ac.uk/news/events/data-webs-new-visions-research-data-web
In his talk he referred to:- openacademia.org
Peter Mika and I were on the Closing Panel; he advocated that
refereeing is an imposition on a researcher's
individual freedom and thus he/she should 'publish' their work on
their own website. By contrast, I argued in favour of
Journals and peer review, both with respect to my articles and my
experiences as an Editor of more than one Journal.
I would be happy to continue corresponding on this not least as
publication should be a varied spectrum of options.
Also I feel obliged to say that one cannot apply simply, by rote,
'Learned Society publisher is good', 'commercial publisher is bad';
there are exceptions in both camps. [in effect this was the tone of
my
last posting.]
Greetings,
John
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Jacob Keller
<j-kell...@fsm.northwestern.edu> wrote:
I guess the practice of being "on your best behavior" is good in
terms
of getting the research trimmed into shape, but there is a huge
temptation to fudge things to get published, and to hide unpleasant
artifacts, as can be seen by the many recent (and not so recent)
scandals. Maybe as a lab website things would be more open. Also,
having a comments section always seemed like an excellent idea to me,
even for journals as they are, but would be really easy to implement
in a website. I would love to read comments from others in the field
about the papers I read, as sometimes people can help to point out
gaping holes where one might not see them otherwise. It would be like
"journal club" for the whole scientific community.
Jacob
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Jrh <jrhelliw...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Jacob
Re journals out of the window:-
Well, like democracy, journals may not be ideal but I believe other
alternatives such as free for all personal website publishing, are
worse.
So, journals that are community driven offer an optimal approach,
critically
based on specialist peer review. That is why our community effort
IUCr
Journals I believe are so important. Open access, where we can
sustain it
financially, also can convey access to the widest readership ie
that the
high impact magazines currently, mainly, command.
All best wishes,
John
Prof John R Helliwell DSc
On 17 Nov 2010, at 18:28, Jacob Keller <j-kell...@fsm.northwestern.edu
>
wrote:
Supplementary info seems to me to be a double-edged sword--I just
read
a Nature article that had 45 pages of supplementary info. This means
that you get a lot more for your money, but all of the methods and
Why not have papers be as long as the authors want, now that almost
everything is internet-based? It would make the papers much more
organized overall, and would obviate the reference issue mentioned in
this thread. To avoid them being too too long, reviewers could object
to long-windedness etc. But, it would definitely make for a more
complete "lab notebook of the scientific community," assuming that
that is what we are after.
Incidentally, I have been curious in the past why journals are not
going out the window themselves--why not have individual labs just
post their most recent data and interpretations on their own
websites,
with a comments section perhaps? (I know there are about a thousand
cynical reasons why not...) One could even have a place for
"reliability rating" or "impact rating" on each new chunk of data.
Anyway, it would be much more like a real-time, public lab notebook,
and would make interaction much faster, and cut out the publishing
middlemen.
JPK
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Phoebe Rice <pr...@uchicago.edu>
wrote:
Another unfortunate aspect of this sort of editorial policy is that
many of
these papers contain almost no technical information at all, except
for the
supplement. I've started to avoid using Nature papers for class
discussions
becuase they leave the students so puzzled, and with a
glossiness-is-all-that-matters idea of science.
=====================================
Phoebe A. Rice
Dept. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
The University of Chicago
phone 773 834 1723
http://bmb.bsd.uchicago.edu/Faculty_and_Research/01_Faculty/01_Faculty_Alphabetically.php?faculty_id=123
http://www.rsc.org/shop/books/2008/9780854042722.asp
---- Original message ----
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:12:26 +0000
From: CCP4 bulletin board <CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK> (on behalf of
John R
Helliwell <jrhelliw...@gmail.com>)
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] Citations in supplementary material
To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Dear Victor,
I strongly support the stance that is in the Acta D Editorial.
Manfred Weiss worked very hard assembling those details and over
quite
some time; he deserves our thanks.
Greetings,
John
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Victor Lamzin <vic...@embl-hamburg.de
>
wrote:
Dear All,
I would like to bring to your attention the recent Editorial in
Acta Cryst D
(http://journals.iucr.org/d/issues/2010/12/00/issconts.html), which
highlights the long-standing issue of under-citation of papers
published in
the IUCr journals. The Editorial, having looked at the papers
published in
2009 in Nature, Science, Cell and PNAS, concluded:
'almost half of all references to publications in IUCr journals end
up being
published in the supplementary material only... Not only does this
mean that
the impact factor of IUCr journals should be higher, but also that
the real
overall numbers of citations of methods papers are much higher than
what is
reported, for instance, by the Web of Science'
Although this topic may seem to concern mostly methods developers,
I think
the whole research community will only benefit from more fair
credit that we
all give to our colleagues via referencing their publications. What
do you
think?
Victor
--
Professor John R Helliwell DSc
--
Professor John R Helliwell DSc
P please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to
Anastassis (Tassos) Perrakis, Principal Investigator / Staff Member
Department of Biochemistry (B8)
Netherlands Cancer Institute,
Dept. B8, 1066 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 512 1951 Fax: +31 20 512 1954 Mobile / SMS: +31 6 28
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