Scientific Publishing: Enough Is Enough
asterainstitute.substack.com

・

25 points

・

lentoutcry

・

3 days ago

14 comments

y-curious ・ 2 days ago

My former PI was a generally terrible person that thankfully no longer has that role. He said something to our group once which summarizes OP's article quite well: "There is no journal of negative results." It's a crappy attitude, but it's true; If you don't make a breakthrough, you won't publish. If you don't publish, you don't eat.

During your introduction to the scientific method in high school, they conveniently leave out the part about needing to be a politician in order to succeed in science.

  • lentoutcry ・ 2 days ago

    to be completely fair, journals of negative results have popped up in some fields, but I've never really heard anyone mentioning any paper published in such a journal

gus_massa ・ 2 days ago

> This loop generally takes 6–12 months or more.

I depends. In physics is like 3 months from the initial submission to the publication of the accepted article. In math there are horror stories of sending a reminder to the editor after 18 month because there is still not a review.

  • radioactivist ・ 2 days ago

    And in many subfields there is a preprint freely available on the arxiv during those three months.

jltsiren ・ 2 days ago

This sounds like something written by an administrator. Someone who used to be an active scientist but then chose an administrative career.

I'd say that the biggest barriers to progress are the people who choose to take the easy path. Progress has always depended on people doing what they believe in. Not because of the institutions and incentives, but despite them. External sources of motivation can help to a degree, but they will eventually fail, as people learn to game them.

Then there are a lot of claims that falsely generalize the way things were done in the niche the author was in to the rest of science. Like authors paying article processing fees when not mandated by funders or institutions. Or that scientific publishing is about publishing the results (rather than, for example, committing to a specific version of the argument you are making). Or that a paper is a result of years of work. Or that people are afraid of being scooped, instead of talking about their ongoing work with other people in the field.

  • ashwinsundar ・ 2 days ago

    The second paragraph literally says "I'm a scientist". Scientists do things other than pipette liquids and stain slides all day. They also get to think about the meta details of their field and try to solve them, which it sounds like what this author is after.

    I think a lot of proof is given in the article about the claims that you suggest are "false generalizations". What "niche" field do you think the author works in, where these issues with publishing only apply there and no where else? More importantly, in what scientific fields is the publishing system actually working? Those would be effective counter-examples, and I'd genuinely be interested in learning why it works for those fields.

    The whole "easy path" argument you're making is totally incomprehisible. Just say whatever it is that you're trying to say. Unless you're saying that scientists should just "care more", and their problems will be solved.

    • jltsiren ・ 2 days ago

      The article also says "I help oversee billions of dollars in funding across several science and technology organizations.", which is clearly an administrative activity. It's also easy to find what the author currently does.

      Administrative track is an established part of the academia. Many professors choose it for a variety of reasons, including interests, ambitions, and a diminished ability to contribute to research. Those people have a background in research, but they are administrators, not active researchers.

      Science consists of many niches – many fields and subfields – each of which has its own norms and practices. People with limited exposure to the breadth of scientific research often assume that other fields are similar to the fields they are familiar with. The generalizations I mentioned in my last paragraph were examples of that.

      Focusing on "the system" is an example of administrative thinking. It's the idea that science is a uniform centralized machine, where the administrators on top make the strategic choices and the people in the field execute them. Actual science is an unholy mess of people, formal and informal organizations, and connections between them. It works in a thousand different ways. Attempts to impose uniformity often make it worse, until people find ways to work around the system.

      The system cannot be fixed, because each field works in different ways. Attempts to change it typically make it better for some fields and worse for some others. Instead of a single system, you need a thousand different systems. Instead of trying to fix science, you should ask more specific questions, such as how to make algorithm engineering, algorithmic bioinformatics or human pangenomics better.

      Those are some of the niches I'm familiar with. I don't find anything particularly wrong with the formal publication system in those subfields, because it's only a small sliver of the communication. In addition to papers, we also have preprints, emails, blogs, Slacks, Zoom calls, GitHub, Twitter/Bluesky, conferences, workshops, summer schools, hackathons, and so on. People communicate in various ways, and they have always been doing that. Sure things could be better, but they could also be a lot worse. The actual issues are in the hard administrative constraints, such as funding, jobs, and visas.

      • ashwinsundar ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        I guess I'm still not understanding the point you're making about this person being an administrator. Does science change so rapidly that all of the observations that the author made, as a scientist in the last 10 years presumably, are completely invalid? Or maybe that they have a completely perpendicular motive from scientists, because they are now an administrator?

        On your last point about the system cannot be fixed, and it could be a lot worse - everything else you're citing is certainly a problem as well. Maybe even bigger in some cases. I still don't see how those are responses to this article's points. It's kinda like a version of "whataboutism" that you're proposing.

        I just don't really get the casualness towards a problem that is widely regarded, among scientists, as something fairly serious - "publish or perish". Why do a handful of publishing houses get to have so much control over the careers of people who dedicate their lives to a field, often at great personal and financial expense (in the form of lost wages and consistently lower pay)?

        I thought science was supposed to be about the discovery, and dissemination of information. Why is the process of doing capital-S Science so gatekept behind university or big corp doors? Why is the only output of most scientific research a dozen pages of virtually indecipherable material? Why can't we know about the process that was taken to arrive at those conclusions, especially when they are so incredibly consequential to all of our lives? Science is responsible for virtually all modern advances - why doesn't the public have the right to understand it fully?

        That's my takeaway from the article, and I'm curious how you arrived at such a wildly different conclusion.

        • jltsiren ・ 2 days ago

          "Publish or perish" is not about publishing papers. It's about winning the competition for opportunities to do science. It's about collecting more merits than your peers, in order to land on the right side of the funding line. If publishing becomes easier, you need to publish more in order to win. Or publishing becomes less relevant, and you have to focus on other merits.

          If there are more qualified and interested scientists than funding opportunities, there is competition. If you want less competition, you need fewer potential scientists and/or more funding.

          The main flaw in the article from my point of view is the administrator attitude. You identify a problem, and then you propose solving it by playing politics and making major changes to the system, with unpredictable consequences across the fields. A more constructive approach would be focusing on solving the problem in your own niche, and letting others figure out the solutions in theirs.

          For example, instead of complaining about for-profit publishers and other abstract things, people can just act. There are examples of editorial boards resigning collectively and starting independent journals, which then replace the old for-profit journals or at least become competitive with them. And in some subfields of computer science, many conferences have moved their proceedings from Springer to the LIPIcs series published by a German non-profit.

        • radioactivist ・ 2 days ago

          I'm not the person you're replying to, but in my subfield (scientist is such a broad term) I would say in my opinion at least half of those key problems that are listed in the article are basically non issues. Things really are quite different field to field.

    • afiori ・ a day ago

      I completely agree with the author but during my brief presence in academia I discovered (was told by someone I trusted who claimed to have seen it) that some subfields of biology liked how publishers helped with typesetting and proofreading.

      I was surprised

  • tracerbulletx ・ 2 days ago

    Huh? Aren't the administrators the ones pushing the publish or perish meta? How does this sound like an administrator?

    • fc417fc802 ・ 2 days ago

      I don't think anyone is "pushing the meta" here. It's a consequence of how funding is awarded. Fixing it is going to require changing that, which presumably means a coordinated effort to achieve legislated changes.