Thanks James. I endlessly and uselessly fantasise about how to “fix” research. I live in hope that better brains than mine can get the job done, and one day clinical practice might become less polluted by the rot which flows from journals.
As an academic ... the current model seems be that a relatively small number of "top tier" journals are regarded as hopefully, maybe, still with functioning review processes, and everything else is presumed to be junk, in the sense that your management will not believe a publication in them is evidence that you are doing your job.
So, at one level, this is not that big a deal .... Wiley buys some journals that everyone was assuming to be junk, and it turned out this default assumption was justified.
Note, by the way, that this makes it even harder to set up a rival to one of the existing academic publishers ... everyone will just assume your new journal is predatory junk.
Yes, I have seen that. There are... let me be delicate and say 'there often rumours of bad behaviour in certain national research systems and a name that is mentioned in those discussions is Spain'
Fantastic analysis in one place. The Hindawi mess is often discussed in bits and pieces so that the bigger picture is missed.
What can you say about the 140 or so Frontiers journals? There seems to be a lot of hanky pank going on, but some decent authors have published decent papers there, because other outlets won't publish such thought pieces.
Frontiers is easily the most mixed of all the publishers. It used to contain both perfectly legitimate work and total nonsense, but I think this has gotten worse. The policy of 'never reject anything for any reason' coming in over EIC paygrades is very dangerous.
I imagine many readers of this are saying: "If I had been a CEO of Wiley on the day the proposal to buy this publisher landed on the table, I would have said "NO! Next agenda item please.""
guess I had bettter be circumspect as to how I say this ...
as someone who sometimes reviews for the "top tier" outlets... you have maybe 300 submissions, of which you are going to accept 20 or so. Too many to have one person read the lot. Complex system of sending these out to reviewers, so each is reviewed by multiple people. Ok, now you have a provisional ranking. You can reject maybe 200 submissions out of hand as everyone agrees they're rubbish. Now the internal argument begins: ok, reviewers who have read this paper, explain briefly why you think we should accept this paper. Argument ensues. Now you have a list of 20 to accept. Out of which, inevitably, there is about one where you have some technical nit-pick over whether it should have been accepted or not...
Thanks James. I endlessly and uselessly fantasise about how to “fix” research. I live in hope that better brains than mine can get the job done, and one day clinical practice might become less polluted by the rot which flows from journals.
Maybe.
As an academic ... the current model seems be that a relatively small number of "top tier" journals are regarded as hopefully, maybe, still with functioning review processes, and everything else is presumed to be junk, in the sense that your management will not believe a publication in them is evidence that you are doing your job.
So, at one level, this is not that big a deal .... Wiley buys some journals that everyone was assuming to be junk, and it turned out this default assumption was justified.
Note, by the way, that this makes it even harder to set up a rival to one of the existing academic publishers ... everyone will just assume your new journal is predatory junk.
I hadn't thought of that as a barrier to entry, but that's actually a very good point.
It's beyond depressing. You might have seen the following: https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-06-04/a-researcher-who-publishes-a-study-every-two-days-reveals-the-darker-side-of-science.html# “The guardian of the quality of Spanish universities is the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA). In 2017, the body began to demand more than a hundred published studies as an essential merit for a professor to be accredited in certain specialties.”
These are the kinds of incentives driving parts of the current system.
https://www.brainpizza.com/i/145980449/scientific-ethics
Yes, I have seen that. There are... let me be delicate and say 'there often rumours of bad behaviour in certain national research systems and a name that is mentioned in those discussions is Spain'
Fantastic analysis in one place. The Hindawi mess is often discussed in bits and pieces so that the bigger picture is missed.
What can you say about the 140 or so Frontiers journals? There seems to be a lot of hanky pank going on, but some decent authors have published decent papers there, because other outlets won't publish such thought pieces.
Frontiers is easily the most mixed of all the publishers. It used to contain both perfectly legitimate work and total nonsense, but I think this has gotten worse. The policy of 'never reject anything for any reason' coming in over EIC paygrades is very dangerous.
I imagine many readers of this are saying: "If I had been a CEO of Wiley on the day the proposal to buy this publisher landed on the table, I would have said "NO! Next agenda item please.""
Oh, we'll get into that later.
guess I had bettter be circumspect as to how I say this ...
as someone who sometimes reviews for the "top tier" outlets... you have maybe 300 submissions, of which you are going to accept 20 or so. Too many to have one person read the lot. Complex system of sending these out to reviewers, so each is reviewed by multiple people. Ok, now you have a provisional ranking. You can reject maybe 200 submissions out of hand as everyone agrees they're rubbish. Now the internal argument begins: ok, reviewers who have read this paper, explain briefly why you think we should accept this paper. Argument ensues. Now you have a list of 20 to accept. Out of which, inevitably, there is about one where you have some technical nit-pick over whether it should have been accepted or not...