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It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

nature.com

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Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#101

Post by lallysingh »

liliumregale wrote: post #15
bo1024 wrote: post #7

Computer Science's conventions solve these problems (although CS certainly has other problems): * papers are generally posted to arxiv.org immediately on being finished, so everyone can access them * conferences have fixed deadlines and relatively short, fixed/enforced review cycles

Let's distinguish between papers and preprints, please. arXiv has contributed to a blurring of the distinction. The arXiv preprints are useful but should always be taken with a grain of salt. There is nearly no filtering done on things uploaded to arXiv. Everyone accessing someone's uncritically reviewed work is a bittersweet gift.

Let's do a quick analogy. arxiv = github. It's all collaborative writing, right? You publish data, code, and your paper continuously. Then you have releases. Perhaps they get tagged with what publication venues accept them.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#102

Post by dbingham »

I've been working on improving academic publishing and review from a software angle for a year a half. I think there's a ton of room for improvement here (all the software tools journal teams have available to them leave a lot to be desired). In improving the tooling, I think we can make the work of editors and reviewers a lot easier and that will increase the response time of reviews. We can also help editorial teams that want to experiment with things like multiple submissions, or open submissions.

I'm currently building a platform that aims to make these improvements and enable these experiments - the working title is "JournalHub". The one liner might be "Github for Journals". It's in alpha and currently supports preprints and preprint review, journal publishing flows, and post-publication review. I've done a bunch of iteration on the review UX, which draws heavily on Google Docs and Github PRs, and that's getting pretty close to beta. I'm still working on the editorial workflows which are in early alpha.

Once we have a platform that a significant number of journals are using, we can then build opt-in experiments with peer review. An example particularly relevant to the OP is potentially allowing multiple submissions where each editorial and review team can see the other's comments and thus multiple journals can collaboratively review a paper and benefit from each other's work. I've talked to editors who actually suggested the idea while doing UX research, so it's not unfathomable that journals might opt-in to something like that.

My impression from UX research is that there are actually a lot of editorial teams aware of the problems with journal publishing and eager to experiment, but feeling restricted by the mandates of the commercial publishers. So my main goal right now is to enable editorial teams to escape the commercial publishers, to free their hands, and enable their experiments.

I'm still doing UX research and looking for editors and editorial teams interested in talking - so if you're a journal editor and you want to help develop a platform that might help you escape the commercial publishers, reach out! (Email: dbingham@theroadgoeson.com)

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#103

Post by 317070 »

JR1427 wrote: post #87

Speaking as a former scientist, it's worth remembering that peer review is not just about ensuring quality by preventing poor research being published. It also leads to good research being improved, in a very similar way to how code review can improve good code. So doing away with peer review would have some negative consequences. It's also worth remembering that journals are really not very different to newspapers,…

> It also leads to good research being improved, in a very similar way to how code review can improve good code.

But the parallel breaks, as unlike with code reviews, there is no protection against (and the people below are real people I have encountered in my 10+ year research experience):

* A reviewer writing eloquent reviews on every single paper they ever reviewed, explaining why they should be rejected, as a gimmick at this point.

* Reviewers not taking time constraints into consideration. Doing this 2 year experiment would indeed make for a better paper.

* Reviewers not reviewing in a timely manner. Yes, you said you volunteered to review this. It has been 9 months since.

* Reviewers requesting you to cite their papers, however unrelated.

* I quote a full review I once had: "This paper needs more equations."

When code reviewing in a team, these issues get sorted out. In academia, peer reviewing is in a state of complete anarchy.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#104

Post by markhahn »

kelipso wrote: post #85
eru wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always overlay a reputation system on top of your pre-print server. The informal one you describe here, or any formal one you can come up with.

Arxiv has been working just fine for a long time, there's no need to change it. Besides I'm not going to voluntarily post my work so I can get publicly rated by a bunch of unknowns lol.

You're thinking of social-media-type "reputation".

Instead, think of the goal being to associate measures of worth with the reviewers. If you're publicly rated by a bunch of worthwhile people, count yourself lucky.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#105

Post by evouga »

inigoalonso wrote: post #77
bluenose69 wrote: post #25

The author suggests that "The fear that multiple submissions would overwhelm the peer-review system lacks empirical evidence". Maybe it won't "overwhelm" it, but it will certainly add to the reviewing workload. Simply stated, if authors submit to N journals and each asks for 2 reviewers, that's 2N units of work (assuming they can get the reviewers), compared to 2 units of work. But it may be worse than that, actually…

Why can't the journals share reviewers? Once the reviews are in, the editors decide if they want the paper in their journal, and if more than one does, the authors get to pick. Obviously it would be a bit more complicated with revisions, etc. but it would be an improvement over the current system.

Who picks the reviewers and nags them to complete their reviews? This is the principal actual useful work journals do these days.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#106

Post by markhahn »

Keirmot wrote: post #70
mbork_pl wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then someone publishes five good papers and does nothing* for the rest of their life. I mean, the idea looks nice, but there will always be people trying to game the system. But don't get me wrong – I still like your idea, I just think it would need some refining (as you yourself admit, ofc). * As in, no research.

I don’t see a problem with someone publishing 5 great papers early in their career and nothing else. I mean what were the meaningful publications from Oppenheimer in his later years? Or Einstein? Publishing should be done when it matters, not when it’s needed for a salary increase.

"nothing else" really? why would an institution pay them?

in reality, faculty do more than publish, and are also judged by service, supervision, etc.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#107

Post by hedora »

markhahn wrote: post #95

journal "monogamy" is the problem. modest proposal: always publish to arxiv, which assigns the permanent DOI. journals can be offered the article - one at a time if the authors desire, or in more of an auction format. when published in a journal, the arxiv entry is simply updated (new revision findable and attached to the original DOI). this would make research works first-class, rather than journal byproducts. inter…

As a reviewer, it's really painful to get a paper that's completely wrong (especially if it is over claiming) and that already has a large download count on arxiv.

I'm all for putting camera ready copies on it, but submitted drafts really shouldn't be there.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#108

Post by hedora »

mo_42 wrote: post #48
liliumregale wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's distinguish between papers and preprints, please. arXiv has contributed to a blurring of the distinction. The arXiv preprints are useful but should always be taken with a grain of salt. There is nearly no filtering done on things uploaded to arXiv. Everyone accessing someone's uncritically reviewed work is a bittersweet gift.

> Everyone accessing someone's uncritically reviewed work is a bittersweet gift. Review work is not always done by senior researcher (e.g., professors). Senior researchers often hand this down to PhDs. Having 3 to 4 reviews by nice junior reviewers doesn't sound very critical.

If a late-stage PhD student in the same narrow technical field can't review the paper, then it's almost certainly a problem with the paper. After all, junior people are the primary audience for any paper. Also, PhD students often have more depth on their research topic than the professors.

The sibling comments about making sure that most reviews are written by senior researchers also make good points. That should be checked by the program committee or editor.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#109

Post by hedora »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #80
zarzavat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the field certainly. A paper in the Annals of Mathematics is definitely a lot more rock solid than whatever goes on the arXiv, or reviewed papers in certain fields that are particular magnets for junk science.

Funny you should mention Annals. A journal famous for publishing two papers in three years by the same author, one proving some theorem, and the other disproving the theorem. Sure, tons of other journals have done so, but Annals is definitely the highest profile one. Maybe take a look at https://mathoverflow.net/questions/282742/endless-controvers... or https://mathoverflow.net/questions/35468/widely-accepted-mat...…

The way I look at it, we passed the point where there are so many people that no one can read all the papers in their field any more.

Peer review is the first filter that papers go through. It's not perfect (it makes mistakes in both directions), but the output of the peer review process definitely has a higher signal to noise ratio than the input.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#110

Post by trws »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #78
rjurney wrote: post #66

It is time to burn traditional academic publishing to the ground and rebuild it from the ground up, or else let's rebel against the government, give Alexandra Elbakyan citizenship and put her in charge of the Department of Energy to make all computer science research open domain for all the world to see. Requesting $48 for to read a paper funded by your taxes before you even know it is useful to your work will result…

The way forward is for government research-funding bodies (ideally all of them) to insist that funded works only be published under open access. This appears to already be well underway in the UK. [0][1] The article isn't about open access though, so this isn't strictly on topic. [0] https://www.ukri.org/manage-your-award/publishing-your-resea... [1] https://www.nihr.ac.uk/about-us/who-we-are/our-policies-and-...

I’m all for government agencies requiring research to be available to everyone, full disclosure I work for one, but I’m pretty against paying the open access ransom to do it. GP seems to have a beef with the DoE, but policy requires all published works that have even one DoE employee on them be licensed perpetually royalty free and transferable to the government, and that works funded by the office of science (and many other sources) be available through free open platforms like OSTI.gov. Why should we waste grant money on the thousand+ dollar fees to the publishing houses rather than making it free through the already existing, already required, and already working channels? Of course, this is for Computer Science and mathematics. I can’t speak for other fields.
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