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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

#111

Post by hedora »

This is a terrible idea.

The biggest problem I see with the current system is that a small number of authors venue shop by repeatedly submitting the same paper without changes.

Allowing submissions to happen in parallel will benefit that group of bad actors to the detriment to pretty much everyone else.

Also, all submitting in parallel will do is increase the number of erroneously accepted submissions. For one thing, typical reviewers review for multiple conferences, so you'd just be sending the same manuscript to the same person multiple times. Also, most related conferences have a fairly similar bar.

In fact, most papers have pretty good alignment on reviews. Reviewers typically can't see each other's reviews or discuss the paper before submitting their review, so these are mostly independent samples. There are papers that have bimodal scores, but it's rare, and usually due to low confidence reviews or the very occasional controversial paper.

It is often detected when people just ignore previous reviews, and resubmit without revision. Typically, one reviewer will overlap between the two conferences and notice the resubmission. If the paper hasn't changed, that's an easy reject, even if the person wasn't assigned to review it. Allowing parallel submissions would normalize this class of denial of service attack against reviewers.

Also, far more often, the previous reviewer will take a look, and say that the authors did a good job addressing the previous group's concerns. Of course, that can't happen if the paper is submitted in parallel. Allowing parallel submissions would put people that actually improve their work between submissions at an unfair disadvantage.

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

#112

Post by fooop »

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…

> academic publishers are vultures that serve no purpose

This is a naively optimistic view of how knowledge production actually operates. Sure, the scientific endeavor is constrained by what is actually the case (i.e.reality), but without some kind of editorial oversight imposed from above nothing coherent nor useful will be produced. A thousand well-trained, well-intentioned researchers toiling away at a problem will not magically self-organize such that their collective efforts make tangible progress on large, intractable problems. This will be true regardless of how many fancy web2.0/3.0 niceties one throws at the problem, since experience has shown that such solutions only make the problems of social dominance worse, not better. In the end, this sentiment is nearly identical to people complaining about "capitalists".

Do capitalists and academic publishers have purposes to fulfill? Yes. Do they fulfill that purpose well these days? Absolutely not. Like many of our social institutions these days, the people who run them seem to fundamentally misunderstand what their roles are, deferring to some vague, financialized liberalism that believes all problems can be addressed by maximizing human-freedom, with no regard to bootstrapping problems. Because the institution ceases to perform it's role, people begin to believe it has no role. Worse yet, now that people have no idea what the institution's role even is, they have even less of a clue as to how to fix it.

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

#113

Post by firejake308 »

fooop wrote: post #112
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…

> academic publishers are vultures that serve no purpose This is a naively optimistic view of how knowledge production actually operates. Sure, the scientific endeavor is constrained by what is actually the case (i.e.reality), but without some kind of editorial oversight imposed from above nothing coherent nor useful will be produced. A thousand well-trained, well-intentioned researchers toiling away at a problem wil…

> without some kind of editorial oversight imposed from above nothing coherent nor useful will be produced.

True, but academic publishers charge an absurd amount of money in return for very little value. The publisher provides a platform for "editorial oversight" by peer reviewers, but they do not pay the peer reviewers. I would argue that "editorial oversight" in the form of peer review may be worth thousands of dollars per publication, simply providing a platform for that review and profiting from volunteer work should not be compensated as highly as it is right now.

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

#114

Post by kukkeliskuu »

I think one of the root causes for the problems in publishing is that "original" research has much higher status than the grunt work that contributes to the quality of research.

PhD students should probably spend much of their effort in trying to replicate published research papers, instead of publishing "original" research. This would teach them a lot about the typical quality issues in their research field, allowing them to produce quality "original" papers later.

This may sometimes even allow them to publish highly influencial papers that show the limitations of published papers, because quality issues seem so widely spread. This would also allow them to really contribute to the field.

I think we would see this if Universities and journals would take the research quality seriously.

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

#115

Post by PeterisP »

walleeee wrote: post #86
mycologos wrote: post #44

I do computer science research and publish regularly (in conferences, not journals, since that's how computer science mostly works -- you write a paper, look for the soonest upcoming relevant conference deadline, submit there, and get a response 2-3 months later). I think discussions about peer review often fail to explain all of the things peer review can accomplish: 1) Verifying that work is correct, assuming that…

> My perception from computer science is that it should be harder to submit papers, because there are too many authors who simply rarely produce good papers and are clogging up the conferences with endless resubmissions until they get reviewers lazy enough to all say "weak accept". It seems like the root issue here is pathological incentive to publish for career advancement?

That's certainly a driver for much of the pathology, however, I don't really see how that can be changed - I haven't seen any good proposals for what could reasonably replace the current bibliographic metrics for the various funding bodies and institutions. They do need some 'outsourced' objective metric because they aren't capable or willing to do in-depth review of each individual's work, and they won't trust the self-evaluation of researchers or their home institutions.

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

#116

Post by 10g1k »

Tip: Magazines are not part of the scientific process. It is a parasitic industry riding on the back of science to make money. You can do as much science as you want, and not publish it anywhere. Or you can publish it on your own website if you feel the need. But publishing is NOT part of the scientific process.

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

#117

Post by eru »

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.

> Arxiv has been working just fine for a long time, there's no need to change it.

Exactly, that's why I am not suggesting any change to Arxiv.

Think more of people eg submitting Arxiv URLs to Hacker News for what I have in mind. Or discussing Arxiv submission on a forum or in a wiki etc. You can imagine some specialised software that has some better support specifically for material from Arxiv.

That's what I mean by 'overlay'.

Or think of Slatestarcodex publishing a blog post with links to his favourite Arxiv papers for that month. That's pretty much equivalent to what a journal produces. And if Slatestarcodex compiles that link list by doing some peer review and chatting with the authors of the papers, that's almost exactly what the journal does.

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

#118

Post by anticensor »

tiahura wrote: post #88

Why don’t universities publish their own journals in the sciences like they do for law? Why don’t we have the Stanford AI Review or the University of Michigan Journal of Organic Chemistry. Like law, turn them over to the grad students to publish.

Some actually do, but they only accept submission from their own students and members.

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

#119

Post by Fomite »

sxg wrote: post #47
Fomite wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As both a grad student and a postdoc I wrote appeals to rejections for peer review that succeeded.

Yes, you can certainly do that, but I wonder how long the appeal and approval process took? I'd bet it's measured in months.

It was considerably faster than a wholesale resubmission to a new journal, and landed the paper in a better home than it would otherwise have found.

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

#120

Post by Fomite »

eru wrote: post #43
Fomite wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key is that peer review is a promise of an n=2 process. There's no promise that an unreviewed pre-print is going to get two constructive readers. It's also wildly subject to bias - being on a pre-print with a junior, female researcher was eye opening as to the merits of double blind review.

You could blind the pre-print process, too?

I've not seen a major attempt to blind pre-prints, and given you have to remove some identifying information for blinding, I think that would be a tall order.
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