Following up my recent post "A Word to Physics Cranks," I received some interesting comments and follow-up over at my personal Google+ stream (the Physics-specific stream is here). One of my followers commented on the fact that scientific journals are "riddled with prejudice and cronyism" ... which naturally sparked my desire for more specific information.
When questioned on this topic, the commentator pointed me toward an article in The Economist entitled "The price of information." The problem is that this article has nothing to do with either prejudice or cronyism, but everything instead to do with economic problems related to peer review. The article focuses on a petition to boycott the publisher Elsevier, a Netherlands-based publisher of over 2,000 peer-reviewed science journals, including Cell and Lancet. Specifically, the boycott is based on three complaints. Here's a quote from the article (re-formatted a bit to make the points more clear):
Dr Gowers's immediate gripes are threefold.
Elsevier charges too much for its products.Its practice of "bundling" journals forces libraries which wish to subscribe to a particular publication to buy it as part of a set that includes several others they may not want.It supports legislation such as the Research Works Act, a bill now before America's Congress that would forbid the government requiring that free access be given to taxpayer-funded research.
Pending Academic Publication Legislation
If you want a broad overview of the anti-Research Works Act argument, I won't get it into it here, but will instead direct you (for the moment, at least) over to this great TechCrunch article on the subject. And if you're one of those people who likes to go straight to the source, here's a link to the Research Works Act itself (it's short).
On the opposite end of the legislative spectrum is the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which seeks specifically to make government-funded research as broadly accessible as possible. Probably one of the best arguments for this legislation is over at Wired magazine (or, again, you can check out the bill itself - though it's a bit longer of a read).
These are the two extremes of a debate over open science, a movement to make science publication more broadly accessible. This movement is well documented in Michael Nielsen's recent book Reinventing Discovery (and if you haven't read the book, you can check out his great TED talk). Nielson has also specifically commented on FRPAA at his blog, if you'd like his perspective on it.
The Role of Peer Review
The legislative debate is ultimately over whether or not research published in peer-reviewed journals by private publishers can legitimately be distributed for scientific discussion among scientists (or even just science enthusiasts) who have not paid to get access to those publications. I run into this all the time, when I'm talking about a story which leads to a new research paper that's being held up behind a paywall so that I can't access it.
The legitimate concern on the side of the private journals is that the publication process costs money. Beyond the costs of publishing physical books--which will definitely be cut down significantly as things shift to greater online distribution--there are the editorial costs associated with maintaining high standards of quality. In science publications, the main editorial barrier is peer review.
Peer review is the process by which scientific papers get examined by other experts in a field before publication. This doesn't guarantee that the results are accurate, but it does provide a means to weed out some of the more egregious errors before they see the light of day.?Probably one of the best online general analyses of the peer-review process is presented by Maggie Koerth-Baker, over at the Boing Boing website, in her post "Meet Science: What is 'peer-review'?"
The problem is that the peer-review process means finding experts who are willing to review the papers in question and facilitating this review, as well as any revisions and subsequent reviews to get the paper into final form. This is a time consuming process and it also costs money, so the private publishers have a legitimate desire to make their money back (plus profit) by selling the final product.
The open science alternatives to publication typically circumvent peer review, like the ArXiv web archive, where scientists and submit preprints of their papers immediately upon completion, well before they've gone through peer review. The problem is that these papers can obviously still contain significant errors that were overlooked by the original author and it's fairly common for these papers to go through multiple revisions based upon feedback from colleagues and peers. The result is something of a crowdsourced peer review process, but it's unclear if this process is better or worse than the long-established process in place by private publishers.
Peer Review in an Interdisciplinary World
I was recently reminded of the problems of playing fast and loose with peer review when a friend alerted me to the following link on Facebook, for an article "Biochemist publishes a paper solving the mystery of life, but no one understands it." The article recounts a curious paper printed in the open access journal Life, but which is nearly incomprehensible to anyone who reads it. According to this io9 article:
Nobody who's read the paper seems entirely sure whether it's a hoax, an eccentric intellectual noodle, or an unfortunate symptom of mental illness. But one thing seems certain: It isn't science.
Which prompted me to ask (in a Facebook comment): "If it's incomprehensible, I'm curious how it made it into a peer-reviewed journal." A bit of research led me to the answer, in the form of this new paper over at the journal Life, entitled "Publication of Controversial Papers in Life." Here's an excerpt from the abstract:
Life is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors.
Now, it's always the case that the ultimate responsibility for the accuracy of the information rests with the author, but if you have Editorial Board members jumping ship because you're choosing to publish something, maybe that should be an indication that it hasn't yet passed all of the necessary peer-review hurdles and isn't yet ready for publication.
The Future of Peer Review
Controversies like those outlined above just make it clear that as we move forward with more accessible digital science journals, the science community will need to think long and hard about how best to police these journals to sort out the good information from the bad. The one thing I have faith in, however, is that we can ultimately come up with a system that is not be "riddled with prejudice and cronyism," and that, at least, is something worthwhile.
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