New Top Tier Science Journal Announced 57
Shipud writes "The Max Planck society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Wellcome Trust have announced their plans for a new journal for biomedical and life science research to be launched summer 2012. From the joint press release: 'The journal will employ an open and transparent peer review process in which papers will be accepted or rejected as rapidly as possible, generally with only one round of revisions, and with limited need for modifications or additional experiments. For transparency, reviewers' comments will be published anonymously.' The journal will be online-only and open access too, and they promise 'an opportunity to create a journal and article format that will exploit the potential of new technologies to allow for improved data presentation.' Especially valuable is the 'limited need for modifications or additional experiments,' especially since even Nature has recently published a scathing opinion piece about reviewers' almost reflexive demands for additional experiments from manuscript authors."
SUBLUXATION RESEARCH! (Score:4, Funny)
Paging Dr. Bob, paging Dr. Bob.
Please pick up the red courtesy phone...
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Paging Dr. Bob, paging Dr. Bob.
Please pick up the red courtesy phone...
Does AFLAC offer insurance for quackery?
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Here ya go! [timecube.com]
Thank you very much, please drive thru.
A good thing, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...and on the quality of the reviewers. It's pretty hard to get top reviewers that work for free, even if you know them personally. The better the reviewer, the less time he tends to have.
Re:A good thing, but... (Score:5, Informative)
pssst... all technical journals have top reviewers that work for free. that's how the industry works. it's all part of the closed journal gimmick.
"Top Tier" (Score:3, Insightful)
To whom? It's not exactly a design decision, regardless of who your backers are.
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That's just a marketing phrase, but it does suggest a target acceptance rate. For example, while all are very good journals, Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, and Nature are in distinctly different tiers because of their acceptance rates.
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Well, speaking of "design", I once worked for a big tech company. So when one product was launched they held a picnic, and gave away free bags to employees, with this sentence sewed on:
XXX, Profitable By Design!
I LMAO'ed in front of my bosses.
For great justice (Score:2)
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Allowing anonymous comments should help this journal achieve the "top tier" status the owners want. Look at what it's done for slashdot!
Re:For great justice (Score:5, Interesting)
Take the example of one guy (we will call Q) in the space arena. Normally, he is pretty good, but that is because he is working int he field. Yet, I spotted a time when Q was going through some personal issues and was just plain HARSH on ppl. His comments went off-topic and were just slamming ppl. With time, he settled back into his usual good comments, but for a while there, I was AC talking to him (telling him to log out or go to sleep), or even modding him down. I did not want to, but Q's attacks were WAY off base. But the anonymous moderator allowed this feature. Yet, you could see that the guy had been up 24 hours straight, yet, that was not his normal pattern (I had never seen him post every couple of hours before).
Point is, that this system DOES work, but it has its flaws. The real question are, how will this science journal do this, which scientists will use it, which will moderate, and who will read it? It really COULD be decent. It could also be like Faux news, Pravada, National Enquirer, China Daily, etc and just plain sux by targeting idiots with propaganda (welcome trust came to my attention)..
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We all know it .. what we really need is meta-meta-moderation. (fill in your oblig. xkcd ref here)
Re:For great justice (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:For great justice (Score:4, Insightful)
Anonymity is an important part of the peer review process, else everybody would be too busy worrying about their reputations and careers to be honest.
Honesty is apparently a small part of those reputations then.
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I guess you are one of the few brave ones who signed their teachers' evaluations in college.
Why not? Anonymity in student evaluations rarely matters, except in classes small enough that signing risks someone else's anonymity. A prof can try to make it matter if he or she is a dick, and dick students can use it to protect their dickiness, but the solution to that problem is not to take classes with dicks--or to be willing to say "X is a dick and here's why" if they try to retaliate for a poor evaluation.
Re:For great justice (Score:4, Informative)
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Not to mention you can find endless accounts of where scientists absolutely refuse to either conduct research or worse, review research, because the topic is considered "tainted", either by subject matter or researcher association. For almost two decades now scientists have been complaining of not only a broken scientific review process, but that it in of it self is used to bias who obtains research grants. The whole fiend of fusion research is typical.
In a nutshell, the the exception of a small priest hood
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In a nutshell, the the exception of a small priest hood, scientific research has been widely regarded as broken, dishonest, politically driven, and jaded, such that it largely serves the priest hood moreso than anyone else.
I assume you mean "with the exception" and "priesthood", but even though it is regarded as broken (and certainly not by all), it is like capitalism - it's the worst system around, except for all the others.
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I assume you mean "with the exception" and "priesthood", but even though it is regarded as broken (and certainly not by all), it is like capitalism - it's the worst system around, except for all the others.
Well, there is the alternative system of capitalism. It's strange, but the research that has value can have that value priced in tangible terms, ie, which someone is willing to pay for.
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it is like capitalism
Except in this case, its not the system which is broken. Its the corruption of the system which caused it to be broken and widely acknowledged by those participating. Like most societal frameworks, the pendulum perpetually swings. Science is no different. I expect over the next decade or two it will single to a more neutral position which benefits everyone and better science will happen. Then, more quackery will sneak by, completing its swing to the other side, followed by a reverse of the pendulum. Repeat.
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Anonymity is an important part of the peer review process, else everybody would be too busy worrying about their reputations and careers to be honest.
Honesty is apparently a small part of those reputations then.
Different categories. You want to have a reputation as an honest researcher, you want people to know that the results you say you got are valid. A reputation for being honest as a reviewer on the other hand would have far less value to you individually.
Many research communities are small. You come across a paper by a researcher who did you a favor. Maybe they were even your adviser at some point. Maybe they're an occasional collaborator that you were thinking of working with again. The paper is gar
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Without anonymity, there -won't- be honesty from reviewers, and that's just the way it is. Look down your nose at the whole industry with your little bit of fortune-cookie wisdom there if you want, but that's how it has to work.
Well, I can look down my nose at it and appreciate that not enough is done to make it work any other way at the same time. I'm tired of those who pound the table hardest getting the most attention. Somewhere along the line we gave up the idea that a personal reputation was the most important thing you could have. I suspect it has something to do with our leaders, both political and economic, having zero penalty for failure.
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I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that most journals currently don't publish the reviewer comments at all.
They don't publish them, but they are almost always provided to the manuscript authors upon editorial decision - with any identifying information redacted, of course. I've definitely read some papers where I wished the reviewer comments were public (usually because the papers had massive, gaping flaws), but I understand (and largely agree with) the reasons why this isn't done.
On the othe
Countdown (Score:1, Insightful)
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While that's certainly a danger, you're misinterpreting. Access to the content of the papers is open. The reviewer's comments are anonymous. Access to being a reviewer and selection of being a reviewer for a particular paper is not open. Compare this to the normal peer review process, where the reviewers are selected and their comments aren't available at all: here, the only thing that's different is the comments are available, but with the name of the reviewer redacted.
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Why, is 2012 the year you accept that you'll die a virgin and your collection of Babylon 5 fan fiction is worthless?
Review the Practice of Anonymous Reviews (Score:1)
This would be an ideal time to rid ourselves of the plague of anonymous reviewers in science, a practice that is rife with abuse and self-interest.
Why not make the system truly open and publish reviews with the reviewers' names attached? If they're not willing to stand by their own words, they shouldn't be reviewing others' work in the first place.
Transparency is good, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
For real transparency they should demand inclusion of all code and raw data used during the study. If reviewers can't reproduce (starting with only the appropriate COTS software) the numbers in the paper on their own machine, no publication.
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Too good to be true (Score:4, Interesting)
"For transparency, reviewers' comments will be published anonymously."
Where is the "transparency" in this?
"Especially valuable is the 'limited need for modifications or additional experiments,' especially since even Nature has recently published a scathing opinion piece about reviewers' almost reflexive demands for additional experiments from manuscript authors."
Having worked in research labs I know for a fact that this is a strategy to delay publication by competitors. Reviewers most often do resaerch in the same fieled as the authors of the article and, while the reviewers are anonymous, the authors are not. What some reviewers do is, they assign a postdoc to work on the project while leveraging the data in the manuscript. Then they make sure the article will not be published any time soon by asking for more data and/or additional experiments to be performed. This strategy is even more efficient if the reviewers are "authorities" in their fields.
top tier announced ? (Score:2, Insightful)
nothing "top tier" ever gets announced. Something becomes top tier because it proofs itself to be top tier.
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nothing "top tier" ever gets announced. Something becomes top tier because it proofs itself to be top tier.
Counter-example: PLoS Biology was announced as Top Tier, and became so. They made the journal attractive by the editorial board they recruited. This is what the backers of this new journal will do: between Max Planck, HHMI and Wellcome they can get any of the top biomedical researchers in the world lend their names to this journal.
Additional work (Score:2)
Re:Additional work (Score:5, Interesting)
Today the physical costs of publishing online are minimal, so peer review should really focus on novel procceses in experiments and interesting results from valid experiments, not micromanaging.
Peer review is a hack that resulted from the rapid growth of scientific publication in the 20th century, along with the finite resources available for print journals.
It isn't clear to me that it has any place in the online world.
Dreadful as it sounds, /. is closer to the optimal form of online journal than most online journals, which seem to be trying to emulate the limitations of paper journals as closely as possible. Given that everything is published (made public) in arxiv.org anyway, the notion that some journals can meaningfully act as gatekeepers of scientific quality is absurd. The only thing they do is more-or-less arbitrarily filter things according to editorial and referee prejudice, despite our best efforts.
Early numbers of the Proceedings of the Royal Society are full of garbage--Robert Hooke describing a deformed calf that was born near his home, and the like. That didn't stop the progress of science then, and it won't stop the progress of science now if we open the gates to a wider range of people. Good work will still stand out--eventually--without the blessings of "high impact" journals, whose papers are not notably more correct, or even more interesting, in the long run, than those in 2nd (but probably not 3rd) tier publications.
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Dreadful as it sounds, /. is closer to the optimal form of online journal than most online journals, which seem to be trying to emulate the limitations of paper journals as closely as possible. Given that everything is published (made public) in arxiv.org anyway,
Life scientists and medical researchers rarely, if ever, publish in arxiv.org (or have even heard of it), exactly because it is not peer-reviewed. This journal is for life science and biomedical research.
Just add water (Score:1)
How does one achieve instant 'top tier' status, anyhow. One would hope such regard would be earned.
On the other hand, if they publish enough anthropogenic global warming papers they'll be top shelf inside of six months.
This Should Make Great Comedy (Score:1)
Authority Irrelevance (Score:1)
Since my first ventures onto the Internet almost 15 years ago, I've thought that as the increased availability and specification of information on any given topic becomes more readily available, the position of argument from authority will become completely irrelevant. It's a nice fantasy to think that, in present day, any and all published research on Science, stemming from any particular discipline, is a level playing field. A place where the scientific method rings true and the merits of argument, data c
Reviewer "tyranny?" No, supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, I don't see "Nature" or other top-tier journals hurting for lack of submissions. If reviewers are being unreasonably critical, then why are people still submitting there? It's because they're willing to work hard to get a nature paper on their CV. Blaming top-tier journals for being choosy when researchers are willing to to go through it at any cost is a bit backwards.
In my opinion, the better approach would be for researchers to put less emphasis on top-tier publications. It's a piss-poor way of judging how good a researcher is. That has more to do with politics, funding, the number of people willing to work on your project, and ultimately luck than it does with hard work or good results. If you're working in a lab by yourself, doing the whole project by yourself, and publish valid results in a 3rd tier journal, that's a more impressive individual than if you had an army of people doing all the hard work, get stunning results, and publish in a first tier journal. I think that author dilution is under estimated.
It is of course simpler to say "Oh, that's a good journal, he must be a good scientist" than it is to judge that researcher's research as a whole, which is the only reason people do it.
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The trouble is that publications are used as a metric by outside agencies to gauge productivity when assigning funding or offering new positions. It's simply not possible for everyone who is assessing applications to be knowledgeable enough about particular research fields to judge the merit of past publications individually so they fall back on impact factor.
It's well and good to decide to take the moral high road and make your contribution to moving science in a more open direction by only publishing in l
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It's fine to judge individuals that way, but the days of being "an individual" in cutting edge science are long gone. These days you're part of a team. When you go looking for funding for big projects, agencies want to know how good your team is.
They can make the first cut at "which teams have published in Science or Nature recently" and still have more proposals than they need. Of course, that's a stupid way to make your first cut, and I think that behavior is the root of the problem.