Monthly Archives: March 2013

“I don’t think it’s appropriate”

I was struck by this bit of prevarication in Richard Van Noorden’s new piece on open access. First the set-up:

To [Michael] Eisen, the idea that research is filtered into branded journals before it is published is not a feature but a bug: a wasteful hangover from the days of print. Rather than guiding articles into journal ‘buckets’, he suggests, they could be filtered after publication using metrics such as downloads and citations, which focus not on the antiquated journal, but on the article itself.

So far, so good. And then we have this:

Alicia Wise, from Elsevier, doubts that this could replace the current system: “I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that filtering and selection should only be done by the research community after publication,” she says.

What does the weasel-word “appropriate” mean here?

Is Alicia saying that she doesn’t think what Eisen’s saying is correct? No, if that’s what she meant, she would have said so. “I don’t think it’s right to say X” is a much stronger statement.

In fact, “not appropriate” is code for “correct, but we’d rather you didn’t say it”. When you’re six years old, your parents tell you it would not be appropriate to remark on your Auntie Griselda’s wispy moustache. That doesn’t mean the moustache isn’t there. If it wasn’t there, you wouldn’t have an issue. Your parents wouldn’t need to tell you anything. By saying it’s “not appropriate”, your parents are acknowledging that, yes, Auntie G. does have a fluffy upper lip, but that they don’t want you to draw attention to it.

And in the same way, Alicia’s quote here means “Yes, filtering and selection should be done by the community after publication, but please don’t say so. That would be inconvenient for us, since our business model consists of taking money off you in exchange for bestowing illusory prestige. We want you to collude with us in perpetuating the illusion”.

Let’s not be complicit.

Banned from commenting at Nature

My thanks for Richard Van Noorden for drawing my attention to his new piece Open access: The true cost of science publishing in Nature. I wrote a detailed comment on this article, but when I went to post it, I was told “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service”:

banned-from-nature

This news to me. No-one at Nature thought to tell me, or anything. Their system said nothing about when I logged in, nor when I started entering my comment. Just waited till I’d finished, then trashed it.

I have no idea why I am banned. How can I have, when I’ve never received any notification? I can only assume it’s for posting opinions that are at odds with what NPG would prefer we all thought — at least, in the absence of any actual data, that’s the best hypothesis I can come up with. Update 40 minutes later: turns out it was a glitch in the spam-filter. Richard got it fixed, and my comment is now up on the article.

Listen up, Nature Publishing Group: you will never get meaningful dialogue in your comments if you silently ban everyone who expresses a non-party-line opinion random people for no discernable reason. You should be aspiring to be a hub of civilised discourse on these important issues, not an echo-chamber. (If you want that, you can just go and read The Scholarly Kitchen.)

Anyway: I am paranoid enough that I copied my comment before submitting it — I’ve been screwed in too many ways by too many commenting systems to trust anything but my own. So here is that comment, stripped of its context but still IMHO important. Perhaps someone who has not been banned from commenting at Nature could post it for me?

Thanks for this useful post, Richard. I am provoked by this statement:

“Analysts estimate profit margins at 20–30% for the industry.”

Where do such low numbers come from? As is by now well known, the profit margins for the Big Four publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa) are between 32.4 and 42 percent — not one of them has a margin as low as the highest end of the range you cite. Not only that, but commercial academic publishers’ profit margins continue to rise year on year.

The average profit margin among the Big Four is 36%, which means that of the $9.4 billion spent on subscriptions in 2011, $3.39 billion was simply poured down the academic drain. Note that this profit alone would be enough to pay APCs for 2.5 million PLOS ONE articles, 40% more than the world actually produced in that year.

So to spell it out, subscription profits alone would be enough to fund OA publication of ALL research, with just under a billion dollars left over to fund additional research. It’s not just idiotic that we keep paying this ludicrously inflated subscriptions, it’s iniquitous.

Nature on choosing to publish in open-access journals

There’s a good, balanced piece by Stephen Pincock in the new Nature, on the question of whether early-career researchers should publish their work in open-access journals. It seems to be free to read, so take a look at Publishing: Open to possibilities.

I mention it not only because it’s a subject dear to my heart, but also because the article mentions and quotes me. (Regarding “I got quite a lot of criticism from people I respect a lot”, most of those criticisms are in the comments on this post.)

But I also feel obliged to respond to a couple of points in the article, and since it doesn’t seem to have comments enabled, a short post here seems to be appropriate.

First, there’s this quote from Rob Brooks:

Impact factors still pretty much rule. A lot of people — grant committees, administrators and even referees — can’t assess quality. All they can do is count or pseudo-quantify. They count the number of papers you’ve got and count the impact factors of the papers and make a little metric, rather than just reading the papers.

My response: are there really referees who can’t assess quality? Do we really have situations where you submit a paper for peer-review, and the referees evaluate its quality — and recommend acceptance or rejection — not on the basis of the quality of the science, but on the impact factors of other journals you’ve published in?

If that’s true, then those referees should get out of science, now. Or, no — wait — it’s too late for that. They are already out of science. But they should stop pretending to be scientists and go work in McDonald’s.

By contrast, Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust is a beacon of sanity:

Many funders are looking beyond a journal’s brand name. “If you come to Wellcome for a grant,” he says, “we make it clear that funding decisions are based on the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published.” Kiley points to the policies of the UK programme for assessing research quality, the Research Excellence Framework, which stated in July 2012 that no grant-review sub-panel “will make any use of journal impact factors, rankings, lists or the perceived standing of publishers in assessing the quality of research outputs”

Pincock then discusses the open-access citation advantage:

Whether [open access] translates into higher citation rates is up for debate. In 2010, a meta-analysis found 27 studies showing that open-access articles had more citations than papers behind paywalls — up to 600% more, depending on the field — and four that found no open-access advantage.

I would not describe that as “up for debate”. I would describe it “has been analysed in detail and the jury is in”. As noted previously here on SV-POW! and in my submission to the House of Commons, Swan’s data says that on average open-access articles are cited 2.76 times as often as non-open.

The most misleading part of the article, though, is this you-get-what-you-pay-for assertion:

According to Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, there tends to be a positive correlation between an open-access journal’s fees and its score in a system he co-developed that rates journals according to the number of citations they receive, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted more heavily.

However, the actual results show at best an extremely weak correlation, with very wide confidence intervals. (I find it baffling that the page doesn’t give numbers for these important measures.) Someone wanting to summarise these findings in a few words would do better to state that there is essentially no correlation between influence and price.

Apart from these caveats, the article is good, and presents multiple perspectives with little bias — to Nature‘s credit. It’s well worth reading.

 

The poor man’s CT machine

DSCN1178

Another raw photo from the road.

The Morrison fossils from the Oklahoma panhandle were dug up and prepped out by  WPA workers in the 1930s, and their preparation toolkit consisted of hammers, chisels, pen-knives, and sandpaper. (Feel free to take a minute if you need to get your nausea under control.) And whereas most Morrison fossils are much darker than the surrounding matrix, in the Oklahoma panhandle the bone and matrix are about the same color. Sometimes the prep guys didn’t know they’d gone too deep until they sanded into the trabecular bone. Or in this case, into the air spaces in the condyle of this anterior dorsal of Apatosaurus.

Still, we have lots of anterior dorsals of Apatosaurus, and very few we can see inside, and they’re too darned big to scan, so this gives us useful information that a more perfect specimen would not. So I salute you, underemployed dude from eighty-odd years ago. Thanks for showing me something cool.