Talk:Opasnet Journal
A response to a text regarding peer review in the Bad Science blog
This response does not explicitly consider any single article or journal, but attempts to provide some fresh ideas in regard to the common current practice of peer review in scientific publishing.
We are researchers in the field of environmental health and work on developing open practices to creation and use of scientifically sound knowledge on issues relevant to environment and health. In our work of developing methods and tools to facilitate open, ideally unlimited, collaboration on knowledge creation, dissemination and use, we have come to identify important shortcomings in the currently dominant practice of publishing scientific information as peer reviewed articles in scientific journals.
- Articles in many journals, including several with high impact factors, are only available to those who subscribe to the journal or purchase the specific article. In addition, long review and publication processes as well as copyright issues often prevent scientists from publishing their findings openly. Despite the recent increase in open access journals and quickened review processes, the reality of scientific publishing is still far from the ideals of scientific openness.
- Scientific meriting based on the number of publications, and the impact factor of publishing journals, tends to direct scientists to write manuscripts conforming to the consensual view to things and proposing only incremental changes to the current knowledge base, in order to make the peer-reviewers show green light. Thereby, although the practice of peer review itself does not necessarily suppress new and provocative ideas, the meriting practice makes scientists themselves to suppress them. It also directs scientists to keep their data to themselves, instead of providing it for open use, in order to maximize their personal merit by maximizing the amount of publications based on the data under their own name(s). Furthermore, it promotes making science for science, rather than science for society, making a significant proportion of scientific information redundant, excluding the nominal merit it creates.
- The practice of considering a journal article as the basic unit of scientific information is somewhat misleading, as it diverts the focus too much on things like who did the study and where was it published, instead of what is the result and what evidence and reasoning is there, and what conclusions can be drawn from it? Furthermore, journal articles are static objects that once published, do not develop further. Further development on the issue requires creating new and new articles that overlap and replicate what already existed in the previous articles. As articles considering more or less the same issue can be widely dispersed both in time and across the whole range of different scientific journals, the information base created by the currently dominant publication practice can not be described as anything else than fragmented.
We do not have perfect and complete ready solutions to the problems we describe above, but there are some possible alternative approaches that can be seen already.
- Publish first, review later
- New models of scientific meriting
- issue-based publication → developing collective base of knowledge instead of fragmented overlapping pieces of information
- Open workspaces and databases for creation and publication of scientific knowledge
