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What Is Wrong With Scientific Publishing

[Blog]

This blog post is a scholarly publication. It addresses all the points that I feel are important – priority (not that this is critical), peer review, communication, re-use (if you want to), and archival (not perhaps formal, but this blog is sufficiently prominent that it gets cached. This may horrify librarians, but it’s good enough for me) [..].

So the blog post fulfils the role of communication – two way communication – and has mechanisms for detecting and measuring this. As I write this I imagine the community for whom I am preparing these ideas and from whom I am hoping for feedback. Ambitiously I am hoping that this could become a communal activity – where there are several authors. (We do this all the time in the OKF – Etherpads, Wikis, etc.) And who knows, this document might end up as part of a Panton Paper.

I am [now] going to describe new ideas (at least for me) about scholarly publishing [..].

Before my analysis I’ll give an example of the symptoms of the dystopia. This has reinforced me in my determination never to publish my ideas in a traditional “paper” for a conventional journal. Details are slightly hazy. I was invited – I think in 2007 – to write an article as part of an Issue on the progress of Open Access. I took the invitation as an exciting opportunity to develop new ideas and to get feedback [..] This was agreed and I would deliver my manuscript as HTML [..] I put a LOT of work into the manuscript. The images that you see are mainly interactive (applets, SVG, etc.). Making sure they all work is hard. And, I’ll admit, I was late on the deadline. But I finally got it all together and mailed it off.

Disallowed. It wasn’t .doc. Of course it wasn’t .DOC, it was interactive HTML. The Elsevier publication process refused to allow anything except DOC. In a rush, therefore, I destroyed my work so it could be “published”. I deleted all the applets, SVG, etc. and put an emasculated version into the system and turned to my “day” job – chemical informatics – where I am at least partially in control of my own output [..].

I have never heard anything more. I got no reviews (I think the editor accepted it asis). I have no idea whether I got proofs. The paper was published along with 7 others some months later. I have never read the other papers, and it would now cost me 320 USD to read them (including mine). There is an editorial (1-2 pages which also costs 40 USD). I have never read it, so I have no idea whether the editor had any comments.

Have I had any informal feedback? Someone reading the article and mailing me?

No.

Has anyone read the article? (I include the editor). I have no idea. There are no figures for readership.

Has anyone cited the article?

YES – four people have cited the article! [he lists the four sources]. I cannot read 3 of these (well it would cost ca 70 USD just to see what the authors said), but #2 is Open. Thank you Thomas (I imagine you had to pay to allow me to read it) [Thomas and I know each other well in cyberspace]. It is clear that you have read my article – or enough for your purposes [..].

The other three may have read it (two are crystallography publications) or they may simply have copied the reference. It’s interesting (not unusual) to see that the citations are 2 years post publication).

So in summary, the conventional publication system consists of:

In closing I should make it clear that Open Access [which would let everyone to read scientific publications] in its formal sense is only a small advance. More people can read “it”, but “it” is an outdated, twentieth century object. It’s outlived its time. The value of Wikipedia and Nature Precedings for me is that this has enabled a communal journey. It’s an n<->n communication process rooted in the current century.

Unless “journals” change their nature (I shall explore this and I think the most valuable thing is for them to disappear completely) then the tectonic plates in scholarly publishing will create an earthquake.