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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Nobel winner boycotts glamour mags

Op-ed: It's always good to declare that you won't play after you have won.

It's not perfect—see "paying for an editorial on open access"—but Science has its merits despite what one Nobel winner thinks.

The old saying is that winning can go to your head, and winning the Nobel Prize is no different. Nobel winners earn a certain level of credibility and exposure that opens the door to more opportunities while allowing for stronger discretion. The rest of us only dream of this choosy luxury.

UC Berkeley's Randy Schekman won his Nobel Prize in Medicine this year for describing the transit happening within cells. It's important research that could become required background reading for the entire medical field. And since the new notoriety presents Schekman with an entirely unique spotlight, we're all waiting to learn what his next move is.

Initially, at least, Schekman appears ready to use his Nobel platform to talk about about how the top science journals are merely glamour rags that favor style over substance. Speaking to The Guardian this week, he said that leading academic journals represent a "tyranny" that must be broken and that his lab would no longer publish in the likes of Nature, Celland Science.

"I have published in the big brands, including papers that won me a Nobel prize. But no longer," Schekman wrote in the paper. "Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of bonus culture, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals."

What? Remember—and he states as much—that Schekman's work in such journals is what helped his winning campaign. By dismissing the current landscape of scientific literature, he's essentially saying, "I've got mine, but I'll be damned if you get yours the way I did." Schekman has restricted his willingness to compete after winning.

Now, I don't think academic publishing is so terribly broken. Yes, I think peer review doesn't work very well, and I think post-publication peer review will help matters. I also believe that the paywalls around academic literature are far too high and unnecessarily restrict access to knowledge.

Current open access charges are far too high. The average European or American researcher might not blink at coughing up $1,500 to get published, but how have we leveled the playing field? Rich institutions can now afford to publish the crap that they once paid for the privilege of reading. In the end, we're still paying too much.

It doesn't help that the open access scene is a bit of a Wild West. It can be quite challenging to figure out which journals are actually genuine and which are just looking to make a buck from you. So, no—open access by itself is not some panacea.

But every time someone writes about the poor quality of papers in Science, Nature, or any other top-flight journal, what they seem to forget is that this is the chaff. Yes, Science published the Arsenic life paper. But you know what? The first Bose Einstein Condensate was in Nature. Is the impact of that work somehow lessened by being in Nature than it would be if it were in Physical Review Letters? Of course not.

Yes, the high-impact journals publish a lot of stuff that seems to lack substance. But the more specialist journals seem to publish a lot of rubbish, too. Maybe not so many overwrought claims of stunning importance, but there are plenty of statements of the bleeding obvious. Yes, if you find the right journal, you too can publish the finding that water is wet as original science. Frankly, I'd rather have the advertising.

The problem here runs deeper than the publishing industry and its unholy coupling to the business of doing science. It comes down to our definitions of science and scientific output. For instance, if I take the laws of physics and calculate the behavior of a light wave in some new material, that counts as science. But it's really just a calculation. If I measure the behavior of light in the material and find that it agrees with the calculation, that counts as science. But it's actually just finding that the laws of nature are still true.

The reason for doing these two things usually turn out to be good, and the experiments and calculations are useful. But the findings aren't exactly startling stuff. This is the mundane nature of much of science. It has to be done, it has a good and useful purpose—but it's not the science that we envision when we're at school. Yet due to the way in which scientific output is measured, each and every one of those calculations and measurements has to be published. This means that we need to have a large number of publishing venues, and since counting publications isn't enough, they have to be ranked. Therein lies the problem.

Boycotting a journal or a system is not going to help. As long as we try and reduce the sum total of scientific performance to a few numbers, the system will be gamed, and everyone will try to optimize it. It's unavoidable. It's a systematic bubble that will take time, energy, and thought to improve. Until then, it's tough for a researcher to escape it.

That is, unless, you win a gold medal and refuse to optimize afterward.

Editor's note: Randy Schekman also happens to be the editor of a journal himself, so his advocacy should probably come with a "competing interests" disclosure.

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