In a recent article in the
Guardian newspaper Nobel laureate Randy Schekman castigated the ‘ holy trinity'
of prestige journals for their editorial practices (1). He also criticized the
academic promotions process for putting too much emphasis on publication is
these journals. The journals in turn exploit this for their own ends of
increased circulation and profit. While
there is a lot of excellent science published in these venues, the prestige
journal system has two major flaws. The first, pointed out by Schekman, is that
these journals want articles on timely and ‘sexy’ topics only- other equally
good science is ignored. The second is
that the editorial process really isn’t peer review. Much of the decision
making for each journal lies with a small cohort of admittedly very bright,
usually young, full-time staff editors (sometimes decried as ‘failed
postdocs’). This is especially true of
the Nature stable of journals and is
quite at odds with the more traditional approach of journals based in
scientific societies where the editors are distinguished investigators in their
own right and serve on a part time basis.
Schekman advocates
publishing in open-access journals and ignoring the prestige journals. The
trouble with that is that the expanding universe of on-line journals include a
lot of junk, as a recent experiment showed (2). Personally I have more faith in
some of the old-line conventional journals in the biomedical field that have a
long track record of publishing solid science. Despite the emphasis on
publication in premiere journals, my experience is that good science published
in good mid-level journals eventually gets recognition.
(1) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science
(2) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
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