Yearly Archives: 2022

How do we fix the publishing system. Three (doable?) solutions.

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I’ve been playing for a while with some ideas that are at the same time potential solutions, and to some extent doable. But I am aware some are highly unlikely to happen due to social dynamics. They play around with ideas related to reducing the number of papers we publish and changing the evaluation and discovery systems in place.

  1. The Synthesis Journal: This would be a non-for-profit ideal journal that only publishes anonymous papers. There are two types of papers a) Wikipedia consensus-type method papers with the aim to create standard methods. The beauty is that the metadata of newly collected data would indicate clearly which method was used e.g. ISO-345, which has an associated data format and hence combining those is easy programmatically. Bots can even crawl the web if metadata is in EML format looking for studies using standard methods. Methods have no public authors and are achieved by consensus. b) The second type of paper are synthesis papers. Those are dynamic papers that collate data collected with standard methods to answer general ecological questions using modern programmatic workflows. As new data is created following a), the model outputs are updated, as well as the main results. Versioning can do its magic, here. To avoid having field workers that create data and synthesizers that get credit, anonymous teams donate their time to this synthesis endeavor. Hence the anonymity. This will limit also the number of synthesis papers published.
  2. The Cooperative of Ecologists: This is something I really like. Cooperatives have a long tradition of allowing the development of common interests in a non-capitalistic way. Entering in the cooperative would be voluntary (some references or formal approval may be necessary). Duties can involve adhering to a decalog of good practices, publishing in a non-selective style repository, giving feedback to twice the number of manuscripts you sign as the first author, and evaluating a random peer per year with a short statement (no numerical values). The benefits are getting feedback on papers (you can use it to update your results as you see) and having yearly public evaluations you can use for funding/promotion. With one evaluation per year, you can quickly see how your peers judge your contributions to the field. One of the core problems of the publishing system is the need to be evaluated. This moves the focus of evaluation outside where you publish your papers, and these evaluations can highlight better aspects such as creativity of ideas, service, etc…
  3. Crowd-sourced paper evaluation plug-in: As stated in the previous posts, one of the main problems is that we use where papers are published not only serve to discover what we should read, but also to evaluate our performance. I know that a single index will never make the evaluation job, this is why we need to diversify the options for evaluators (grant agencies, hiring committees, … ). Right now, in addition to the number of papers and the journal prestige / IF, metrics like citations received, F1000-type evaluations, or alt-metrics are already available. DORA-style narrative CVs are also great, but hard to evaluate when the candidate lists grow dramatically. So, what if a plug-in exists for internet browsers where you can log in with your ORCID? Each time you visit a webpage of a scientific paper (including archives), a simple three axes evaluation emerges. You can rate with three simple clicks it’s 1) robustness (sample size, methods, reproducibility) 2) novelty (confirmatory, new hypothesis, controversial) 3) overall quality. I am sure these axes can be better though, and reproducibility may be an automatic tag (yes/no) depending on data/code statements. You can also view the evaluations received so far. With enough users, this can be a democratic powerful tool to create one more option to be evaluated. Plus, recommendation services may be built upon it. I would love to read a robust controversial paper liked by many of my peers. I believe this is not complex technologically, and if done in a user-friendly way, can help the transition to publish in non-selective free journals or archives. This also selects for quality and not quantity. I know cheating is possible, but with verified ORCID accounts and some internal checks to identify serial heaters/unconditional fans and the power of big numbers, this may work.

This is it. If it was not clear, the aim of the post is to think outside of the box, and lay out a few ideas, not a detailed bulletproof plan.

Where the hell I publish now?

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The scientific publishing system is hindering scientific progress. This is known and I won’t repeat myself or other more detailed analysis dissecting the problem of publishers making massive profits on our behalf without (almost) any value added (e.g. Edwards and Roy 2017, Racimo et al. 2022).

In the last years, cost-effective alternatives to publish our results have emerged and I don’t think technical aspects are an issue anymore. I think the problem is that when I publish something, I want to be read. I know that if I publish in certain journals, the day before the paper is published almost all researchers interested in that topic will see my paper. I also want to be evaluated. Most funding agencies still use where you publish as a quality indicator of your contribution (consciously or unconsciously), not to mention that the same paper published in a given journal will receive much more citations than if published elsewhere, if citations are what funding agencies will look at, bypassing the infamous IF. 

My approach so far has been trying to publish in Society Based Journals. Despite most of these journals still partnering with big publishers, I heard that most have a decent deal with publishers (but I also heard some got terrible deals). The advantages are obvious. Those are well read and evaluated, have no APC, and the money they make reverts to the societies. The drawback is that not all my papers are top papers that can find a home there, and that the papers are not open access (you pay to read). This is secondary for me in a world with SciHub, but still important. In addition, this model is getting slowly outdated, and some of those journals are already changing to pay to publish model. Paying high APC (anything > 200 EUR for the EU standard) is a bad replacement for the current system in my opinion.

I made a quick tally and in the last 5 years (2017-2021) I published:

  • 32 papers in Society Based Journals with no APC. Wow! These include BES, ESA, Nordic SE, AAAS, Am Nat, and other conservation and Behavioural societies.
  • 6 in Selective Journals that require APC (but about half of the time my co-authors paid for the APC), such as PNAS, Nature Communications, or Scientific advances, but also other less fancy. I try to minimize those because, despite their visibility, I prefer to invest money in salaries, then in publishers, but if I (or my lab group) can publish in e.g. PNAS, this is money well invested regarding career advance. Let’s be honest.
  • 5 in Non-Selective Journals with APC such as Plos, Open Science B, Sci Reports, PeerJ… Not always my decision, and while I support non-selective journals, especially if non-for-profit or with sustainable policies, their APCs are increasing in an unsustainable way.
  • 3 in For Profit Selective Journals without APC. Despite trying to convince my co-authors to avoid those, I do not always succeed. Yes, I had 1 paper published in Elsevier last year (sorry). The other two are high-impact journals whose visibility might compensate for the balance (TREE and Nature E&E). Everybody has a price.
  • 2 Free to publish – Free to read Journals. This is the way to go! One is in a Journal I did not know until recently. The other is the newly created Peer Community Journal, which I support. Other Journals in this list are Web Ecology, Journal of Pollination Biology, Ecologia Austral, and to be honest, not much more that I know (and Ecosistemas, despite it publishes mostly in Spanish). I am also looking forward to the new EU-Horizon Journal, but it’s closed to EU-Horizon projects, and I think it still costs quite a lot to the EU per article, so indirectly, we are still paying for it.

While I am happy with the last 5 years’ record regarding where I published, I think this is not enough. I want to publish more in free-to-publish – free-to-read journals, especially if I am the first author (I got tenure already). But I also want those to be read. Our Peer Community Journal paper has almost no citations despite being quite good (IMHO). I am sure that if it was published in Ecology Letters it will have now several more citations.

So how do we fix this? I have some ideas, but nothing clear. The next posts will explore those ideas.

Resources about Ecology Journals:

Conserving biodiversity will need true sacrifices.

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[this is a half-baked reflection after a lab meeting discussion on the EU biodiversity policies. Thanks to the lab and especially to Elena Velado for the discussion]

We are embedded in a culture where the only valid success is complete success. Making compromises, or renouncing something to focus on other priorities is often seen as a weakness if not a failure. There is no better example than what we see every day in the movies. Even when the main character has to make a sacrifice, in the end, he or she ends up gaining everything, including what they sacrificed. For example, you need to let go of your true love, but then you discover that was the way to secure it. You renounce your dream job for your family, and this allows you to find an even better job and be successful also in that dimension. You need to betray your friends to save the galaxy, and your friends still love you for that. You get the point. We are in a culture where we are expected to do small sacrifices to gain it all anyway, so in the end, you really don’t sacrifice anything.

The EU Green Deal is also embedded in this narrative, where we are promised that with a “small” economic sacrifice, we can conserve biodiversity, and in doing so, we will enhance our well-being and our economy. No real sacrifices and a vision that changing gears to support biodiversity will allow us to keep growing economically. I love this story, and it would be great to switch to a more sustainable future with no real costs. In fact, I used the fallacy that conserving pollinators is cost-effective because they will increase your crop yield. But this is not completely true. When going deeper, we also showed that pollinators worth conserving are not usually the ones who deliver crop pollination (Kleinj et al 2016) and that the costs of sustaining pollinators do not always compensate economically via an increase in yield (Scheper et al in prep). This does not mean we shouldn’t safeguard pollinators, but that doing it only for economical reasons is not going to work. At some point, we need to sacrifice something, and it’s our choice.

The danger of a narrative that ignores real situations of compromise where you need to sacrifice things that make your life easier, and not acknowledge that there are trade-offs that force us to choose is that we create false expectations. Expectations that we will always win in all axes. But narratives are important because they prepare society to make decisions. And we need honest narratives now to prepare us to take those decisions tomorrow. Only by being clear on the fact that we will need to make decisions and renounce something in order to gain another thing will set us in the right framework.

We should start the conversation on what are we willing to sacrifice or compromise and what not to conserve biodiversity. Indeed, we may discover some sacrifices are not as hard as they look, especially for the average citizen. Maybe we prefer to have one more species of butterfly in the EU than having a few rich people traveling to space for pleasure. Maybe we prefer to eat strawberries only in spring, but have birds migrating through our wetlands. It’s all about educating ourselves and being aware we decide our future, but not selling fairy tales.

Our behavior is heavily influenced by the context we live in. The first step to change behaviors is to create the adequate context, and for me, this context needs an honest narrative that acknowledges trade-offs and prepares us to take informed decisions.