PLoS now has blogs. The announcement accentuates that they have an equal representation of scientists and science journalists.
Neuroanthropology, authored by Daniel Lende and Greg Downey, will be of interest to many of my readers. John Rennie also has a "plog" as they're calling them, "The Gleaming Retort". "Speakeasy Science", by University of Wisconsin journalism professor Deborah Blum, has made the jump to PLoS as well.
The Guardian now has a small network of science blogs. Their launch announcement includes this surprising factoid:
You would not know it from general media coverage but, on the web, science is alive with remarkable debate. According to the Pew Research Centre, science accounts for 10% of all stories on blogs but only 1% of the stories in mainstream media coveage. (The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at a year's news coverage starting from January 2009.)
I'm not sure that science accounts for 10% of stories on science blogs, but the idea is irresistible. Just think if all the effort we spend on grant applications could be directed toward productive work!
Did you know that the three-volume Handbook of Paleoanthropology is a thousand dollars from Amazon?
A thousand dollars! I thought that the prices of edited volumes had gotten out of control, but wow! I like open access because I know when I write something, I want people to be able to read it without worrying about how to afford it.
Anyway, it looks like the books can be had for $500 from other sellers. Don't know why Amazon is so high. I was looking for one of the articles, and couldn't figure out why the library keeps them on permanent reserve. Guess now I know -- they're too expensive to replace!
Re: "Experts are usually wrong"
So, what you're trying to say, is that science is a human enterprise?
Can't be... because it would logically follow that concentration of power in the hands of a few would lead to bad outcomes!
Do high rejection-rates perversely make some journals more likely to be wrong?
That's the question that occurred to me, reading a column by David Freedman ("Why experts are usually wrong"). Freedman, whose book is Wrong: Why experts keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them, makes a big point of the high rate of medical studies that are later shown to be incorrect. Put together the desire for easy answers, the pressure for positive results in grants and publications, and a strong tendency toward groupthink, and you end up with a club of experts that propagate wrong information.
It was the passage about journals that made me think:
These journals want the same sorts of exciting, useful findings that we all appreciate. And what do you know? Scientists manage to get these exciting findings, even when they’re wrong or exaggerated. It’s not as hard as you might think to get a desired but wrong result in a scientific study, thanks to how tricky it is to gather good data and properly analyze it, leaving plenty of room for ambiguity and error, honest or otherwise. If you badly want to prove an experimental drug works, you can choose your patients very carefully, and find excuses for tossing out the data that looks bad. If you want to prove that dietary fat is good for you, or that fat is bad for you, you can just keep poring over different patient data until you find a connection that by luck seems to support your theory — which is why studies constantly seem to come to different findings on the same questions.
Take a journal that rejects 19 papers for every one it publishes. A paper will be much more newsworthy, and therefore more likely to get through the publication filter, if it has some unexpected result. Or, in some fields, if it provides a key confirmation of some bigwigs' pet theories. Even marginal statistics may be enough to get these kinds of papers published, because they'll attract a lot of attention and citations. A negative result in most fields, even with very strong statistics, doesn't drive that kind of interest.
It seems to me that these conditions should make a journal more likely to contain erroneous results. Journals would like us to think that more rigorous peer review makes up for these biases, but clearly it won't, unless reviewers demand systematically lower p-values.
Savage Minds' crew has been discussing the future of publishing in the American Anthropological Association recently. Rex Golub compares Open Folklore to AnthroSource:
How has OpenFolklore gotten on the road to success when AnthroSource has fallen so, so far off of it? To be honest, I don’t know the answer, but I can make several guesses: the association is much smaller, and probably much less controlled by non-academic executive officers. They probably recognize that they are in it for the love it, and that folklore is always going to be a marginal proposition, budget wise. The result is a small, relatively agile, values-driven group run by academics with their heads screwed on straight and willing to get their hands dirty. On other words, very very different from the AAA.
Christopher Kelty points to correspondence of the committee tasked with the future of publications.
One memo stands out though: the one by Kim Fortun, which she wrote as an advisory member and outgoing co-editor of Cultural Anthropology. [Full disclosure: yours truly and the debates on this site are cited several times within. She sent it to me for review, and I've posted it here with her permission]. Kim’s memo could be a handbook for understanding the current crisis and politics of scholarly publishing in general, and the promises, fulfilled and unfulfilled, of the AAA’s union with Wiley Blackwell, in particular. It is incredibly detailed, well-sourced, well organized and throughtful–far beyond the call of duty of a memo. I hope all the section assembly advisors get a chance to read it, as well as all the Section Assembly representatives and as much of the membership as possible.
He links directly to the memo (PDF), which is as he says -- a document that lays out the current problems with academic publishing as applied to the goals of the AAA.
I don't understand why AnthroSource had to be so difficult. Any moderately trafficked blog has much more usage than AnthroSource now has. Savage Minds and I together have more than 50 times the AnthroSource usage.
If you make papers open access, you can forget the rigmarole with logging in users, and then all you need is a search function and download links. Heck, I've got a bibliography of more than 11,000 papers running on the site now! The back-end could be done on a cloud server for less than $100 a month -- maybe a lot less. Same for bandwidth at its present, low level. Replace the dead tree printing of journals and extend open access worldwide, and bandwidth will be higher as will be the journals' reach.
It takes more to run the journals, handle new submissions, and provide editorial services. Some costs can be reduced by requiring every submission to be e-book-ready, plain HTML with PNG images. "Production" should be proofing and posting. It would have the beneficial effect of making articles automatically accessible for the visually-impaired, through screen-reader software. Marketing the journals as e-book subscriptions could recoup these costs at a much lower price than the current membership model.
It may not be the best solution, but anybody who wants to spend a whole lot more needs to show why the benefits justify the cost.
The editor of the Journal of Neuroscience, John Maunsell, has announced that the journal will no longer permit authors to add "supplementary" material to their papers [1]. I've railed against supplements for a long time, as paleoanthropologists have consistently abused them to shunt essential methods and data into a partially reviewed, poorly formatted slush pile.
Sure, the idea is great -- the data and methods can hide somewhere that the interested can find them, while the marginally-interested can focus on the sparkling whitewash of the introduction and conclusions. Er...
Science published a monograph's worth of pages on Ardipithecus. Many of the papers were online-only. Some of the papers were accompanied by up to 70 pages of "supplement." What happens? In some cases, these failed to include standard measurements and essential details to replicate their comparisons.
The Neandertal genome paper was awesome, I'm glad that the journal ran it in the form it did. But the 200+ pages of supplement should have been divided into 10 separate papers! They deserved separate recognition and review. The science will be better when the "supplementary information" is treated seriously.
Maunsell's statement discusses many of the problems of supplements, as applied particularly to neuroscience. This part of Maunsell's statement is worth reading carefully:
We have carefully considered alternatives to removing supplemental material from the peer review process, but have found none acceptable. The idea of demanding that reviewers thoroughly examine supplemental material is impractical. Even if all reviewers could be coerced to review supplemental material with care, it is not clear that this should be encouraged when it would inescapably reduce scrutiny of the main article. Attempting to limit the amount of supplemental material authors can submit is not a solution. Any reasonable fixed limit on what authors can present (e.g., as many figures as are contained in the manuscript) would permit enough material that it would not address the issues of inadequate peer review and misuse by reviewers and authors. Attempting to police submissions so that only important supplemental material was included would leave editors and reviewers with a burden comparable to the one they face now, and one that they are unlikely to take on with greater enthusiasm. Allowing The Journal to host supplemental material that has not been peer reviewed is not an option that the Society for Neuroscience is willing to support.
To their great credit, some important journals in paleoanthropology do not rely on supplementary information.
One point that is made too rarely: Separating content in this way impedes accessibility. Are those Microsoft Word and Excel files accessible by screen reader? Do they get transmitted with preprints to readers without subscriptions? Are they even readable for colleagues in developing countries using older or open source versions of spreadsheet software?
PDF files are not perfect in these regards, either. Journals should really be looking for a better way to make their content accessible.
(via DrugMonkey, with more from Christina Pikas and Dorothea Salo)
Bora Zivkovic on a heavily-trod topic ("Why is some coverage of scientific news in the media very poor?") describes some of his work sifting through press coverage of PLoS papers. It's been a while since I linked a good blogging navel-gazing post, and Bora has some interesting ideas as usual. A sample:
So, a brief article contains a lot of unnecessary stuff [Bora mentions "journalism tricks" like human interest, lede, inverted pyramid], while it leaves out the most important pieces: the details of methodology and the context. Those most important pieces are also most interesting, even to a lay reader - they situate the new study into a bigger whole and will often prompt the reader to search for more information (for which links would be really useful).
I wouldn't go so far as to generalize. Good writing is hard to find.
Ivan Oransky writes "Embargo Watch", which reports on issues related to journal embargoes and science reporting. His story about the Malapa embargo "break" last weekend is fascinating: "Now it can be told: My take on the Science hominin 'missing link' study embargo."
It's an interesting look inside the world of science journalism, and the comments include replies from the press office at Science and some of the journalists involved in breaking the story. By their account, the initial stories this weekend were a result of old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, finding scientists outside the research team willing to comment on what they knew. In this way, the Sunday Telegraph could run with the story before Science had even released its press kit.
A propos to the "open access" theme, reader Bram Hessels writes in with a link to his "People with Online Paleoanthropology Papers" page.
