Discussing science publishing at the pub

There isn't going to be any such thing as a high impact journal in the near future. Now that nobody actually "reads journals" anymore, the only value added to publishing is 1) peer review and 2) medline indexing. Nature is going to have to come up with something else if they want to keep their status "better" than other journals.

whimple,

Journals may disappear, but not anytime soon. As for people reading journals, a good scientist peruses all the major journals. Sure when it comes to my field of expertise I search for papers on Pubmed, but often some key experiment was published in some archive journal, that is why they are there. That is true today, that was true for scientists ten years ago and that will be true for quite some time I suspect.

Much of the future of scientific publishing will depend on financing. Who will pay for all the open access information? PLoS is surviving on a large endowment, but will other journals (or web2.0 service providers) have such resources? It appears that NPG is shifting to an online advertising model, and we will see if this works, but it is too early to tell. And if most scientists have an incredible story, I have no doubt that a vast majority would submit their work to one of the big journals. The pressure to perform and to meet a certain standard (i.e. publishing your work in a high impact journal) in order to obtain a job, funding and recognition will not disappear.

"a good scientist peruses all the major journals" This tells me you're either leisurely tenured faculty, or student. In either case, good for you for keeping up. Frankly, between doing science, writing grants, mentoring students, reviewing papers, going to meetings and oh, yes, having a family, it is not possible to leisurely peruse the major journals. It's all I can do to keep up with my saved search strategies on NCBI cubby.

Nature is a prestigious journal for only one reason: people think it is. It's the same with trendy nightclubs in L.A. How can they sustain that? Coast on their history? Once upon a time, they could sustain that by being the only journal guaranteed to be found in every institution's library. Those times are gone. It isn't enough to just be ultra-selective -- if it were, PLoS Biology wouldn't be going under financially, but it is. What else does Nature offer? I bet this question keeps them up at night.

Yeah, I agree with whimple. It's gotten to the point that I honestly don't often make note of what journal a paper was in. I remember the authors, usually the institution, but the journal name has really ceased to be of any importance. I can assess a paper's quality on my own, without the name it's published under. Hell, I can't remember the last time I even opened a paper copy of a journal issue.

Re: Journals don't matter.

Well I would love to be in that world, but unfortunately where you publish does matter. It may not be what we want but it is how the system works. Yes journals are a human creation, and they only matter because of consensus, but that is how all human institutions work. Right now is a time of change in the publishing industry. How this will all work out will depend on researchers' attitudes, economics, funding agencies etc. We can do our part in helping those business models that are accepting open access (keeping in mind that it may not be feasible). We can push the government and the electorate to help finance open access and convince them that this investment will benefit them. In your first comment you write that journals will be obsolete, replaced by open access repositories, while in the second comment you lament that PLoS, a model for the open access repository model isn't fairing too well. Well how is this going to work? The answer is that no one is quite sure. Some like Reed-Elsivere are trying to prevent change, other like Nature are accepting it and trying to remain relevant and evolve.

As for perusing the big journals, a group of labs here get the journals and they are in our lunch room. We regularly sit flip through them and discuss papers over coffee. I also get email updates from 6 journals. As for slacker, sure I don't have students to take care of, but I'm in the lab from 10AM to 8PM almost everyday working on 3 different projects.

I'm very much a fan of NPG embracing internet publishing as much as it does. I only wish other journals like Cell and Science would pitch in to do similar things.

It doesn't seem like high-impact vanity journals will ever go away. Every field has their big journal; Chemistry has JACS and Angewandte, Physics has PRL, even with the advent of things like arXiv, Scifinder, and so on. There are too many journals and papers being published that at some level, people will just read the vanity journals more due to time constraints. And that means that those papers get cited more, which means those journals have a higher impact, and then those journals matter more for tenure, and then it's all a lock-in. Sure, there are initiatives like PLoS ONE, but right now they don't seem to be taking off very quickly.

Well, it matters when I'm submitting manuscripts, too. I'm saying that when I *read* papers, I don't really pay too much attention to the journal. I get TOCs from all the ones I'm interested in, and click on any paper that seems relevant/interesting. Often without really noticing which journal it is. From talking to the other postdocs/grad students around here, this seems pretty common.

Glad you had a good time Alex...would love for you to bring more folks out next time (and yes, we will be doing the next pub night near Longwood) and spread the word. Thanks for coming and writing about it. If you're a scientist in the Boston area, please come out.

Just to chime in, I agree, I don't think peer-reviewed, high-impact journals will go away anytime soon (unless the scientific community can come up with a better way to quality-control and filter communications about the latest scientific results and can come up with a better way to judge/measure a scientist's accomplishments when hiring/promotion decisions are made). Readers may not notice the journal when they click on the link for an article, but you need a journal to deliver you that TOC and that link and PDF in the first place (even if you don't notice or care who's sending you the TOC).

The question is what form the journal will be in.

Alex, your interpretation of what NPG is trying to do with all these new Web 2.0 sites is fair, I think. In my personal opinion (not necessarily shared by NPG, but it might), these new forms of scientific communication online will never replace peer review and peer-reviewed journals, but I think they'll serve as another forum for communication, and for fostering a different type of communication that you might not see/hear elsewhere.

It is interesting to read all the comments about the open access regarding scientifically online publishing. I am sure many people would enjoy the benefit of clicking free.

But meanwhile, I observed that it is projected that the
USA's top companies are likely to raise their competitive intelligence budget ten-fold by 2010. Initially, it appears to me those two are totally separated subjects. As the latter only involves the business information gathering rather than the scientific research.

However, I have found a contradiction while I was reading this part: the pharmaceutical section has the highest proportion amongst all other industries. I assume that the pharmaceutical arena is one of the biggest scientific publishing areas as well, correct?

This means that companies are going to spend more on accessing the scientific information. This therefore leads to confusion: why couldn't open-access reduce the cost of this information?

I understand there is a huge different between business use and exploiting the info for personal purposes. In developing countries, open access are uniquely critical. It seems that the price barrier for personal use is falling whereas the price for business use is rising. Perhaps this contradiction will continue for the foreseeable future.

It seems to me like there are a number of generation gaps in the scientific community. An obvious one is between young scientists and senior scientists with respect to journal "status". Young scientists were trained with PubMed and they place a lower priority on the "status" of a journal. Senior scientists, on the other hand, focus more on journal "status" because that is how they were trained and because they know that "status" matters to tenure committees and their peers. Tenure committees have to evaluate work in fields that they may not have the time or expertise to critically analyze. The stamp from Nature is an easy way to say that work is good without truly evaluating the work yourself. Until we come up with another easy measure of quality journals will still matter for quite some time.

I went to a talk yesterday given by Emma Veitch from PLoS. One of the topics that came up during the discussion was the concept of an impact factor for a paper, not the journal. This type of metric could dramatically alter the publication paradigm, because tenure committees would have a new metric to use for evaluations.

I'm excited about the future of research because young scientists have been trained with Web2.0 and it should eventually impact nearly every aspect of their research. Modernizing journals is just the tip of the iceberg. The most dramatic changes will happen to the process of research itself. Just wait.

In reference to your post in which you ask about our "game plan" ;-), I can refer you to a couple of sources. First is the NPG author blog (Nautlius), which I run for authors past, present and future - i.e. the scientific community and how we interact with you. There are two or three posts a day on that blog, which will inform you of lots of free content that we publish, for example. MSB is an entire journal but a lot of NPG journals publish free articles. We also have free online publications - a thriving database programme (see http://www.nature.com/databases/index.html) and the new Nature Reports series (so far avian flu, stem cells and climate science). Nautilus also provides updates about these publications and new ones, as well as free resources for the community like Scintilla and Nature Precedings. (it also provides other information and discussion points but the ones I've described above are most relevant to your current posting).

Second, Timo Hannay, head of web publishing at NPG, recently published the draft version of an essay he wrote on Nascent (NPG's web tech blog), called "The Web Opportunity", see http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2007/06/post.html#more

I think that Timo's post will give anyone a pretty clear idea of NPG's current "official" thinking on matters science/web 2.0 - but keep checking, it is a fast-evolving process ;-)

best wishes
Maxine.

PLoS is surviving on a large endowment, but will other journals (or web2.0 service providers) have such resources?

Peter Suber:

[In 2006, b]oth the Hindawi and Medknow OA journal collections became profitable, an industry first. All the Hindawi OA journals use author-side fees and none of the Medknow journals do so. Together, therefore, they elegantly answered doubts about the business models for fee-based and no-fee OA journals.

I believe BioMed Central are doing OK financially as well.

I think Curtis' points bear repeating: the younger the scientist, the less they care about journal prestige and the more likely they are to recognize that the Impact Factor is an unreliable kludge -- and that new metrics (Hirsch index, Eigenfactor, etc) will provide much more fine-grained and accurate ways to compare researchers and research institutions with their peers.

Already I'm told that tenure/granting committees are using Google Scholar to get a feel for the "citability" -- or to calculate the h-index -- of an individual scientist, rather than relying on the clumsy proxy of "number of papers in high-impact journals" (especially since "high-impact journals" is defined by a publisher using proprietary data!).

Does anyone know if there are any easy ways, such as a website, to calculate the h-index or another factor for the impact of a paper, aside from Google Scholar?

Curtis: Google has apparently blocked this one, and this one has a warning about server load but perhaps it still works.

Curtis, you can use Scopus www.scopus.com and WoS http://scientific.thomson.com/index.html to calculate H-index.
Both of these require subscription.
Rafael

Check your spamfilter? I left a comment on this and another thread, but they had links in 'em...

Yes, please check your spam filter, Alex: I too left a comment on this thread 24 hours ago but it has not appeared. I hope it provided some answers as to what Nature is thinking about so it might be of interest to you and your readers. Thanks, Maxine.

While I'm bothering people about their spamfilters -- Maxine, would you check yours as well please? I left a comment on Nautilus ("A female road of science"), and again I think there were links in it so perhaps it got eaten.

Everyone has been de-spammed ... Maxine thanks for the link, I'll check it out as soon as I have the time.

Thanks for unblocking my comment, Alex, dont think I could have reconstructed that one!
Bill, your comment is live -- apologies, not only did you get caught in the spam filter (which, incidentally, also catches my comments) but the e-alerting for comments mechanism seems to have stopped working also. All fixed now, but my apologies.