Does the publishing process impact the way science is conducted and disseminated?

Undergoing the process of scientific publication is inevitable for researchers, but most find this a daunting task as it is long drawn and effort intensive. After submitting their paper to a journal, researchers not only have to follow the author guidelines, but also have to ensure that their paper meets the expectations of the journal editor and reviewers. This train of thought leads us to the question: Does the publishing process have an impact on the way science is conducted and communicated?

Researchers have expressed their displeasure about reviewers demanding more experiments to be conducted that at times do not make a significant contribution to the paper. Often, researchers have to bear more costs and spend more time in conducting these “reviewer experiments,” which also leads to delayed publication. In a similar vein, Ronald Vale, professor and vice-chair of the department of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, observes in his paper Accelerating scientific publication in biology that an increasing number of journals call for a “mature research story.” To cater to this demand of journals, researchers spend a significant amount of time in experimental data. Resultantly, the publication timelines increase, sharing of information gets impeded, and postdoctoral and graduate training gets prolonged.

The journals’ request for more experimental data stems from the ‘publish or perish’ culture of academia. Prof Vale notes that the amount of experimental information in papers belonging to life sciences published in the journals Nature, Cell, and Journal of Cell Biology has increased over the past 30 years. Although research with smaller datasets is credible, top-ranking journals demand complete experimental data. However, it is not merely the elite journals that require more data. Low-tier journals that want to elevate themselves to the level of top-tier journals adopt similar patterns. He says, “While the elite journals are important driving forces in the scientific market place, the trend towards more data is felt throughout the publication ecosystem.” Further, he provides the example of Francis Crick and James Watson’s breakthrough research in 1953 on DNA structure that they discussed in two consecutive papers. These papers were published in Nature “based upon the magnitude of the idea” although individually the papers failed to communicate the complete story. If such a paper is submitted to a journal today, the author is likely to be rejected as a hypothesis is expected to be supported by detailed experimental data.

The trend of including detailed experimental data has an impact on other crucial aspects of knowledge dissemination and career progression. Since researchers want to get published only in high ranking journals, they gather more experimental data than probably required. This delays submission and eventual publication of a study. It also has bearings on the time it takes for postdoctoral students to transition to junior faculty positions. Students have to cater to the journals’ requirement of submitting a paper with complete dataset, which leads to delayed publication, and they end up spending more time in training rather than moving ahead in their career and pursuing research. Another underrated but possible repercussion of this delay, as Prof Vale points out, is: “Scientific meetings are becoming increasingly filled with recently published or soon-to-be published results, rather than exciting work in progress.” Work in progress benefits from conference discussions, but published or soon-to-be published work does not.

Is there a way to hasten scientific publishing and communication? As suggested in Accelerating scientific publication in biology, researchers should be encouraged to publish their papers in open access pre-print servers such as arXiv. Submissions to such a repository can make research accessible to the scientific community immediately after the completion of a paper. It can also enable both students and researchers to apply for grants or jobs without the need to get published in a journal. However, he concedes that, “A pre-print repository may not solve the “amount of data” required for the next step of journal publication.” To tackle the problem of data requirement to get published, Prof Vale suggests the introduction of “key findings,” which is “a new journal format whose focus is on limiting data more than text.” Such a format would enable the publication of papers with smaller datasets and discourage researchers from gathering a large amount of data to get published.

Michael Eisen – a biologist at UC Berkeley, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science – has a different view regarding some points Prof Vale has made in his paper, which he discusses in detail in a blog post. While Eisen agrees that journal requirements stall scientific communication and career progression, he believes that the root of the problem is placing disproportionate value on journals. “If you fixed this deeper problem by eliminating journals entirely and moving to a system of post-publication review, it would remove the perverse incentives that produce the effects Vale describes,” he states. He further adds that to encourage researchers to publish their research immediately rather than collecting data to create a single “mature” paper, they should be given credit for their contribution. This would also shift the focus from publishing in high ranking journals, bringing a change in the publishing culture of science.

Getting published has become vital to researchers to the extent that it has become an end in itself rather than the means of communicating research. Evaluating researchers by their scientific output and the impact factor of the journals they publish in is having a huge impact on the way research is being disseminated and even conducted. To bring the focus back from publication to research, funders, institutions, and researchers need to re-perceive the incentives around publication.    

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