Earlier this week I had a post on the 'sting' that was the topic of an article published in Science, purporting to show that many (most?) pay-to-publish open-access journals are not sufficiently selective on what they publish because they have an obvious motivation to accept as many papers for publication as they can. The presupposition seemed to be that this is not the case of subscription-only journals, which have good reasons to be selective, and thus presumably to publish higher quality articles.
Well, today I came across a blog post contesting exactly this presupposition. It's a great post, which you should read in its entirety, but the main point is that the key desideratum for subcription-only journals is to publish 'sexy' research, of the kind that generates a lot of citations, so as to increase the impact factor of the journal (and thus to increase subscription revenue). The author of the post, Michael Eisen (a biologist at Berkeley) even offers the example of a ludicrous paper published in -- yes, you guessed it right -- Science, which should have never passed any decent quality control process.
Below the fold you can read extracts from the post, which describes subscription publishers as "seasoned grifters playing a long con", among other spot-on observations. The general conclusion is again that peer-review is a flawed system, and even if for the moment there doesn't seem to be any real alternative to it, it is important to keep in mind that it is a deeply problematic system. (The author is refering in particular to his field of research, but as I've argued before, there are reasons to think that the problem is equally acute for philosophy.)
And the real problem isn’t that some fly-by-night publishers hoping to make a quick buck aren’t even doing peer review (although that is a problem). While some fringe OA publishers are playing a short con, subscription publishers are seasoned grifters playing a long con. They fleece the research community of billions of dollars every year by convincing them of something manifestly false – that their journals and their “peer review” process are an essential part of science, and that we need them to filter out the good science – and the good scientists – from the bad. Like all good grifters playing the long con, they get us to believe they are doing something good for us – something we need. While they pocket our billions, with elegant sleight of hand, then get us to ignore the fact that crappy papers routinely get into high-profile journals simply because they deal with sexy topics.
But unlike the fly by night OA publishers who steal a little bit of money, the subscription publishers’ long con has far more serious consequences. Not only do they traffic in billions rather than thousands of dollars and denying the vast majority of people on Earth access to the findings of publicly funded research, the impact and glamour they sell us to make us willing participants in their grift has serious consequences. Every time they publish because it is sexy, and not because it is right, science is distorted. It distorts research. It distorts funding. And it often distorts public policy.
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First, and foremost, we need to get past the antiquated idea that the singular act of publication – or publication in a particular journal – should signal for all eternity that a paper is valid, let alone important. Even when people take peer review seriously, it is still just represents the views of 2 or 3 people at a fixed point in time. To invest the judgment of these people with so much meaning is nuts. And its far worse when the process is distorted – as it so often is – by the desire to publish sexy papers, or to publish more papers, or because the wrong reviewers were selected, or because they were just too busy to do a good job. If we had, instead, a system where the review process was transparent and persisted for the useful life of a work (as I’ve written about previously), none of the flaws exposed in Bohannon’s piece would matter.
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