SEED Magazine: The scientific paper is becoming obsolete

SEED Magazine, a New York-based magazine on science culture, just published an interesting article about how science publishing is about to be transformed by the internet. You might think that this is an old hat, and in fact the idea that the internet revolutionizes the way we publish and access scientific results is not new. Indeed, "the Internet" was "invented" by scientists to share knowledge. Yet still, subscription costs rise, although the price of knowledge dissemination via the internet is much cheaper than in printed media. The market has obviously failed. Access to scientific results has become expensive, so expensive that the main funders of science (tax payers) only rarely can access to the knowledge which is produced using their money.

More importantly, limited access to scientific results directly harms scientific progress. It is not unusual that it takes about two years until a paper is published. By the time a scientific breakthrough is published, it often fails to make real impact, apart from discouraging other labs to work in that direction.

The tools to overcome the limitations are all there: Scientific results can be published on preprint servers (like arXiv or Nature Precedings) right after writing them up. The stream of information coming out of those servers can be filtered by the scientific community by writing blog posts, or by commenting on the preprint servers directly. So why are these tools still so rarely used in life science?

The answer is simple: Lack of incentive. Writing blog posts does not extend my contract, papers on preprint servers do not increase my university budget (opposed to papers in high-impact journals), and often the possibility to publish in popular journals is compromised by publication on a preprint server.

However, incentive will rise as more and more researchers get frustrated by the corporate science publishing machinery. As more and more university libraries drop out from subscriptions as publishers increase their fees, researchers focus on open access journals. As it is becoming more and more difficult to publish in high-ranking journals, researchers consider alternatives which enable them to spend more time on research and less on getting bashed in anonymous peer review.

For example, PLoS ONE is very successful with publishing papers reviewed for technical correctness, but leaving it to the reader to gauge it's scientific impact. Recently, even Nature publishing group picked up the idea and started it's own version of PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports.

While these journals make it easier to publish one's findings, it is up to the researcher to make an impact in terms of influencing the field. Doing good research takes you only half way. The other half consists of convincing other researchers about one's ideas. The great advantage is that this process takes place in public, while in anonymous peer review it is hidden from the largest part of the scientific community.

Preprint servers vs. anonymous peer review

Recently, I got a manuscript rejected. There's nothing wrong with that, I consider rejection as a part of the publication process. Or more precisely, as a stop on the way to the publication of a manuscript.

But what really was annoying is that the reviewers did not even seem to read the manuscript until the end. They criticized the lack of a specific kind of information. But this information was explicitely elaborated upon in the discussion part. Even after pointing them to the exact paragraph where the information was given, they did not acknowledge it (let alone say whether this satisfies their criticism). And then it took them two months and several iterations back and forth to finally reach their conclusion to reject the article.

This experience goes along with what I hear from colleagues, namely that they seem to get more and more rude reviews. Constructive criticism appears to be a rare good in neuroscience nowadays. In addition, it is not uncommon that it takes a year or longer from the initial submission to the final publication of the manuscript.

One of my thoughts was that probably the concept of anonymous peer review poses a problem here. As the pressure to publish rises, so rises the number of journals. These journals require more reviewers, who get more papers to review. It becomes increasingly difficult to devote the necessary time and effort to judge a manuscript in its entirety. In addition, there is no way the reviewers' effort is honored when peer review is anonymous. Journals like the Frontiers in... series already act up by naming reviewers on the published manuscript, in order to get the reviewers' contributions noticed.

I would definitely welcome an open peer review process, where reviewers are named from the first revision on, and the reviews are made publicly accessible. Preprint servers like ArXiv are pretty much what I'd like to have in neuroscience. You put your paper there, you get comments, you revise the manuscript, and at some point a journal or a conference will accept it. Your knowledge is accessible right from the first upload on the server. Efficient exchange of scientific results favors the rapid advancement of the field. Moreover, it is much less likely that you get scooped during the review process, since you can always document when you published the paper for the first time.

I will evaluate possibilities for this kind of publication for the resubmission of my manuscript.