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The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

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Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#21

Post by coliveira »

rgejman wrote: post #15
coliveira wrote: post #11

These complaints are just nonsense propagated by people who don't understand the academic process. As a researcher, I don't need to wait for a paper to be published in a journal to have access to its contents. Most respectable research is already publicized in targeted conferences and stored in websites such as arxiv.org and similar. That's exactly why researchers go to conferences every few months, in order to learn…

In the biomedical sciences most publications DO NOT end up on preprint servers before being peer-reviewed and accepted. Therefore most stories are "done" a year or more before they are published anywhere. Sometimes they are presented at conferences, but often only once the paper is in submission.

Each technical field decides the best way to handle new research. If what you said is true, this is a matter particular to this and similar fields. However, many articles such as the one linked above make it believe that Science as a whole has a big problem because of peer reviewing standards, which is NOT true. In fact, most fields already have procedures to disseminate and archive results in a way that does not conflict with traditional peer reviewing.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#22

Post by coliveira »

et2o wrote: post #18
coliveira wrote: post #11

These complaints are just nonsense propagated by people who don't understand the academic process. As a researcher, I don't need to wait for a paper to be published in a journal to have access to its contents. Most respectable research is already publicized in targeted conferences and stored in websites such as arxiv.org and similar. That's exactly why researchers go to conferences every few months, in order to learn…

Do you really think this reviewer for FASEB, an HHMI Investigator and a tenured professor at Rockefeller University, doesn't "understand the academic process?" For better or for worse, biology isn't like computer science. Wet lab experiments take orders of magnitude more time, interpretation of results is often pretty complex, and there are a lot more articles published, which together combine to make this situation…

This only proves that this person is working in a particular dysfunctional field, among thousands of other scientific fields that have no problem with the process. There is probably no research area more competitive than astrophysics. The guys working there, however, decided to use arxiv.org to make available research that costs them millions of dollars and several years of work to produce. I don't see why the biological science community couldn't agree on something similar. It is a social problem, not a process or technological problem.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#24

Post by untilHellbanned »

rgejman wrote: post #19
untilHellbanned wrote: post #5

Huge irony in Leslie Vosshall's suggestions. She is a HHMI investigator and has "made it". Telling others not to try for the top 3 journals which is the EXACT path she used to get to her spot is insulting. Basically don't do all this stuff she did to get ahead because you'll make the system worse. It's like Mark Zuckerberg telling young programmers, don't start an internet company because society is suffering from al…

I think this is an unfair characterization of her editorial. She did not get to her position by getting mediocre papers published in good places! She is just asking authors to be honest about whether their findings are of sufficient importance/impact to be published in one of the top journals. I have seen many many colleagues run the journal mill, aiming as high as possible for as long as possible, just like she desc…

I think this is an unfair characterization of my comment. I didn't imply she published "mediocre papers". I don't think anyone intends to publish mediocre papers. Everyone is trying their hardest and believes in their work.

What I'm arguing is that she, like you apparently, aren't seeing the situation from the other person's perspective. Telling everyone else they are "wasting time and clogging the system" is just a game of "he said, she said". It's a battle nobody will win.

Papers are subjective. Notice Leslie Vosshall continues to publish frequently in these top 3 journals after her FASEB post (2012). Is she really being honest with herself? It is pretty easy to come up with reasons why anybody's papers should or should not be published in the top 3 journals. Again, its subjective.

What we need is not a pointing fingers solution, but a meritocratic one like the internet itself. We need data-driven decisions and not yes man/woman editors and wink-wink, nudge-nudge 3 crony reviewers behind closed doors.

It continues to baffle me as to how the scientific community can be so scientific about their research and yet so unscientific about how they communicate this research. Technology is making more science possible, and yet we stick with thousand year old practices of evaluating and communicating science?

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#25

Post by untilHellbanned »

chrisseaton wrote: post #12
rcthompson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm not sure what other fields may be affected, but I can confirm that this is a huge issue in biomedical journals. It's especially a problem for bioinformatics, where the combination of multi-year publication latency and the typical fast pace of software development means that tools are often long obsolete by the time they are published, and this results in researchers relying on publications and choosing algor…

If you write a research result up as a blog article that doesn't stop you publishing it in a journal does it? You could use blogs to communicate and journal articles for more formal write-ups.

Just like leaking an album, blogging about a paper jeopardizes it's earning potential so its not commonly done. Earning potential in science is prestige, grants, jobs, etc.

Publishing/broadcasting whether its music, words, video, or code has always been about doing something first. Seems like human nature. Don't see that pyschology changing any time soon.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#27

Post by untilHellbanned »

coliveira wrote: post #22
et2o wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think this reviewer for FASEB, an HHMI Investigator and a tenured professor at Rockefeller University, doesn't "understand the academic process?" For better or for worse, biology isn't like computer science. Wet lab experiments take orders of magnitude more time, interpretation of results is often pretty complex, and there are a lot more articles published, which together combine to make this situation…

This only proves that this person is working in a particular dysfunctional field, among thousands of other scientific fields that have no problem with the process. There is probably no research area more competitive than astrophysics. The guys working there, however, decided to use arxiv.org to make available research that costs them millions of dollars and several years of work to produce. I don't see why the biolog…

Yes, its a social problem. The reason is because for biomedical sciences there are many more tangible levels of success - personal, professional, financial, commercial — to be had. Nobody is gonna win in astrophysics like they can win in the biomedical sciences. Therefore what you end up with is much more of a hairball, mutually assured destruction scenario.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#28

Post by toufka »

rcthompson wrote: post #14
chrisseaton wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you write a research result up as a blog article that doesn't stop you publishing it in a journal does it? You could use blogs to communicate and journal articles for more formal write-ups.

Most journals require that any research submitted to them must not have been published elsewhere. On the surface, this makes sense, especially in the pre-internet world in which scientific publishing developed. You wouldn't want to allow someone to submit the same paper to multiple journals to inflate their publication count. However, things like preprint servers and blog posts have become a gray area with respect to…

Submit to Biorxiv [1]. Most journals have actually recently changed their terms to explicitly allow pre-print publication.

[1] http://www.biorxiv.org/about-biorxiv

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#29

Post by epistasis »

nonbel wrote: post #20

>"Is this you? Your Ph.D. student has just finished 5 years of spectacular work, the manuscript and figures go through 12 revisions, then your colleagues and friends provide input for the next 10 revisions, you submit the perfect “version 22” manuscript to a carefully targeted scientific journal appropriate for the manuscript, and then you wait. And wait. And wait. Months elapse" Funny stuff. In the end most of these…

>The term 'non-reproduced' was assigned on the basis of findings not being sufficiently robust to drive a drug-development programme.

Funny stuff. This editorial is about making it so that preclinical publications are only published when they're ready for the clinic. It's not about the same experiments being reproducible. It's not an indictment about the quality of research or the utility of research for advancing knowledge. However, this editorial is often cited by people outside of the field to bolster something that it does not bolster.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#30

Post by nonbel »

epistasis wrote: post #29
nonbel wrote: post #20

>"Is this you? Your Ph.D. student has just finished 5 years of spectacular work, the manuscript and figures go through 12 revisions, then your colleagues and friends provide input for the next 10 revisions, you submit the perfect “version 22” manuscript to a carefully targeted scientific journal appropriate for the manuscript, and then you wait. And wait. And wait. Months elapse" Funny stuff. In the end most of these…

>The term 'non-reproduced' was assigned on the basis of findings not being sufficiently robust to drive a drug-development programme. Funny stuff. This editorial is about making it so that preclinical publications are only published when they're ready for the clinic. It's not about the same experiments being reproducible. It's not an indictment about the quality of research or the utility of research for advancing kn…

Forget whether independent replication worked out and how the authors make confident claims in the paper ("this shows that", "therefore this is true") then back down and admit it was preliminary data afterwards.

Can you find one biomed paper published this month that is reproducible in its current form? I mean no missing/conflicting methodological information.

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