Journalology #147: Second-order thinking
Author-facing appraisal vs reader-facing curation
Hello fellow journalologists,
In recent weeks I’ve had my head down writing the the corporate annual reports assessments. Elsevier and Springer Nature are published. The next essay to arrive in your inbox will cover MDPI and Frontiers.
The essays, plus the Easter holidays, have slowed down production of the core Journalology newsletter. Normal service resumes as of today, but with a twist.
Journalology needs to cater to different audiences: some readers value Journalology for its comprehensiveness; others would prefer to receive just the headlines alongside my interpretation of what the implications may be.
The core Journalology newsletter has become unwieldy in recent months. In large part that’s because I want to create a valuable resource for paid subscribers. Moving from amateur to professional has created (self-imposed) pressure to provide more value than I did last year.
However, sometimes less is more; editorial filters are in themselves beneficial. Therefore, I’ve decided to change tactics slightly.
This issue of Journalology contains five stories that are likely to have broad appeal and that I consider to be important (plus a bonus in the ‘And finally…’ section).
I’ve also been working, in parallel, on a living document on Substack, that contains the wider news for April. Paid subscribers can read the work-in-progress document here:
I’ll update this ‘Briefly quoted’ document regularly over the next few weeks and will email paid subscribers the final version early in May (and a new document each month thereafter). In the meantime you can access it right now to see what’s been announced recently.
In this way, I hope to make the core Journalology email shorter and more impactful, while also providing news junkies with an at a glance summary of all the announcements in a given month.
The Jist will continue to focus on news stories, written by journalists, and will be free to read by everyone.
Right, to business. Here’s a summary of what I consider to be the five (or six) most important and interesting stories of the past few weeks.
Realigning incentives for biomedical researchers and journals through researcher-shared outputs
By anchoring researcher evaluation in researcher-shared outputs and journal business models in service execution instead of exclusivity, this framework fosters more inclusive, transparent, and efficient assessment of scientific work, while ensuring that journals are appropriately compensated for the value that they add.
Zenodo preprint (Bodo Stern and Erin O’Shea)
JB: The authors hold senior positions at HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), one of the most prestigious funders in the biomedical sciences. Their 2019 PLOS Biology paper, A proposal for the future of scientific publishing in the life sciences, laid out the Publish, Review, Curate editorial model that eLife subsequently adopted.
(HHMI is one of the funders (and founders) of eLife and both Randy Schekman and Michael Eisen, who previously edited the journal, are HHMI investigators. The current editor-in-chief, Timothy Behrens, is funded by the Wellcome Trust, another eLife funder.)
In many ways the recent preprint is an update to their 2019 paper. The fact that it was published as a preprint, and not published in a journal like PLOS Biology, tells its own story. Many of the publishing industry’s problems could be solved, the authors argue, by decoupling author-facing appraisal from reader-facing curation; preprints are the solution.
The essay is well written and argued, and is much more balanced than I was expecting. I enjoyed reading it. That doesn’t mean that I agree with their conclusions, but it would be worth your time to engage with it.
I fundamentally disagree with their core premise that authors should be able to publish whatever they want, whenever they want. They see the gatekeeper role of editors as being deeply problematic. I spent most of my career working on highly selective journals and so I have a different view.
It’s important to remember that HHMI is an elite funder; it only awards grants to high quality researchers. Journal gatekeeping just slows their researchers down, the HHMI authors argue. OK, I could buy that to some degree. But let’s not forget that sound science publishers like MDPI and Frontiers only accepted 40% of submissions last year, according to their annual reports (more on those soon…). There’s a huge amount of bad research being submitted to journals. Do we want to create a system that allows nonsense papers to be published at scale whenever researchers fancy pressing the publish button?
This relates to my major criticism of their paper: there’s little discussion about the potential unintended consequences of their model. We must learn from the mistakes of author-pays open access. It was obvious to many of us that if you create a system where publishers can earn more cash by publishing more papers, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.
Decision makers need to engage in second-order thinking and to consider, in great detail, what the deleterious downstream effects could be, before mandating this kind of approach.
