4th article that shaped my career: “The politics of publication.” Lawrence, 2003

“It will be a chilly day in hell before all the older scientists agree to change anything, much less something that currently benefits many of them.”

Robert Insall

This great quote was actually not in the article, but in the comment from Robert Insall from University of Birmingham, one issue later.

This article, that was introduced to me by my good friend @stevensrhe, carried many ideas that had already passed through my mind. You don’t need a lot of brains to see that science ‘politics’ is as bad as any other kind of ‘politics’: scientists are human beings subject to all the flaws of character that other humans have. But now all these ideas were printed in Nature!

The scientific community is actually aware that citation indexes are not proper indexes to evaluate science and scientists, that they produce strong bias, that they drive researches to produce fast-food science, but nobody does nothing about it. It is very sad.

The day anyone decides to take the matter on his own hands to do anything about it, this commentary from Peter Lawrence is a good way to start. Because it is all there.

The decision about publication of a paper is the result of interaction between authors, editors and reviewers. Scientists are increasingly desperate to publish in a few top journals and are wasting time and energy manipulating their manuscripts and courting editors. As a result, the objective presentation of work, the accessibility of articles and the quality of research itself are being compromised.

Lawrence, 2003

I can understand that a scientist, as a person, includes human motivations on their scientific agendas. However, the fact that the different verification systems that science created to keep the integrity of the scientific information cope with that, perpetrating a system that is compromising the quality of the research, makes me, again, vey sad.

Why has this happened? It is partly because, rather than assessing the research itself, those who distribute the money and positions now evaluate scientists by performance indicators (it is much easier to tot up some figures than to think seriously about what a person has achieved). Managers are stealing power from scientists and building an accountability culture that ‘aims at ever more perfect administrative control of institutional and professional life’. An ‘audit society’, in which each indicator is invested with a specious accuracy and becomes an end in itself.

Lawrence, 2003

Nelson Rodrigues, a great Brazilian play writer and author, use to say that “the obvious roars”.

And so do Peter’s statements:

Non-scientists think of science as universal. Celestial, even. But science is terrestrial. Territorial. Political. (…) All are learning that building capital in the hard currency of the audit society can be safer and easier than founding a reputation on discoveries. (…) contemporary society has (also) a craze for publicity, to which scientists are not immune.

Lawrence, 2003

A major issue among scientists is the define the authorship on a paper. This can be extended to concerns about the actual property of the research. Those moral, social or just academic concerns are not simple and are simply not being discussed among peers. Imagine other less tangible questions like “what is my scientific question? What is my hypothesis?” So it really pleases me when I see something like this good suggestion about publish timing:

The ideal time (to publish a paper) is when a piece of research is finished and can carry a convincing message

Lawrence, 2003

But instead of teaching this and doing this as good example to their students, researchers submit

At the earliest possible moment (…) Findings are sliced as thin as salami and submitted to different journals to produce more papers.

Lawrence, 2003

And because no one wants to risks getting rejection, younger researhcers are giving their data to group leader to write the article, for they are more experienced and more able to present the work in the best possible way. This creates a vicious circle where the student or postdoc is supposed to be on the producing while the leading scientist does all the thinking and writing. And as a result, young researchers never learn how to writ up results.

The publishing politics has also effect on editors and reviewers

Nature now receives around 9,000 manuscripts a year. (…) In leading journals there are too many submissions to send most out for peer review, so the editor’s decision has become, quantitatively, much more important than the judgment of reviewers. Consequently, editors are courted by authors who resort to tactics such as charm offensives during “presubmission enquiries”, networking at conferences and wheedling telephone calls.

Lawrence, 2003

On the other hand, because top journals are also highly profitable, competition for to papers is so high that publishing houses sent their editors out to woo star scientists.

These forces (economical and political) all combine to create an antiscientific culture in which pushiness and political skills are rewarded too much, and imaginative approaches, high-quality results and logical argument, too little.

Lawrence, 2003

In the authors opinion, the reviewers have been acting more like censors than assessors to the editor:

Reviewers are, of course, authors wearing a different hat. There can be conflicts — for example, does the reviewer favour the work of a competitor and thereby endanger his or her student’s career? Such opposing interests can explain why two reviewers of similar expertise sometimes present vastly different opinions about the same paper. (…) Objectivity is also threatened by a tacit understanding between some leading scientists: they invite each other onto committees, to conferences, nominate each other for prizes and awards, and support publication of each other’s papers.

Lawrence, 2003

Mr. Lawrence’s writing is so impeccable, that is hard not to quote his own words when he concludes:

The most effective change by far would be if the organizations that award grants and manage research programmes were to place much less trust in a quantitative audit that reeks of false precision. Such organizations have the big advantage of hindsight — unlike editors and reviewers at the time of submission, they can ask themselves if key papers published by the candidate are illuminating, have proved influential and whether their main results have been confirmed by others. (…) They (editors) need to act now to reinstate authors’ rights. Editors should appreciate that, unlike the authors whose names are out there, anonymous reviewers will not be held to account if they make a mistake. It should always be remembered that the proper role of the reviewer is to advise the editor, not to gain control over the author’s paper. Editors should also take a more longterm and broader view about what is of interest, and act positively to encourage new approaches and topics in an affirmative action against fashion.

Lawrence, 2003

Yes…. show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome!

He finishes urging his peers to act to change this establishment. He argues that should be then, older, well-established scientists (not endanger younger scientists), who should be making these points on committees for grants and jobs, and should not be so desperate to push their papers into the leading journals.

This was almost 20 years ago and not much changed. Once I believed that politics on science publication would be forced by blogs, social networks and all the easiness of internet publishing to adapt the same that music industry had to adapt to napster. But that didn’t happen.

#DeSci, Decentralised Science, is my new hope that we might not need to wait for a cold day in hell after all.