Talk:Opasnet Journal

A response to a text regarding peer review in the Bad Science blog

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 we have come to identify some important shortcomings in the current practice of publishing scientific information as peer reviewed articles in scientific journals.

Many articles are only available to those who subscribe to the journal or purchase the specific article. In addition, long review and publication processes and 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 disseminating scientific is still far from being open.

Scientific meriting based on the number of publications directs scientists to write manuscripts that conform to consensual views and propose only incremental changes to current understanding in order to make them easily acceptable by peer-reviewers. 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 encourages scientists to keep their data secret in order to maximize the amount of publications based on the data under their own name. It is difficult to see this as beneficial to developing scientific understanding.

Furthermore, the common idea of a journal article as the basic unit of scientific information is somewhat misleading. It tends to divert attention too much on things of secondary relevance, such as who did the study, who wrote the article and where was it published, instead of focusing on what are the results, what evidence and reasoning is there, and what conclusions can be drawn? Journal articles are static objects that do not develop after publication. Further development on the issues considered in the article requires creating new articles that mostly consist of reproduction of already published information. As articles considering similar phenomena can be widely dispersed both in time and across the whole range of different scientific journals, the knowledge base created by the current scientific publication practices can not be honestly described as anything else than fragmented.

There are no perfect and complete ready-made solutions to the problems described above, but some possible approaches are worth mentioning.

1. Publish first, review later. This principle is already somewhat applied in physics and some related fields of science (see arXiv). It speeds up the process of getting new ideas published and poses no unnecessary need of suppressing controversial ideas. Review and evaluation procedures can well be designed and implemented so that they address already published articles. We believe that open publication policy complemented with good "review later" practices is rather likely to increase than decrease the scientific quality of publications.
2. Publishing in web-based information bases/workspaces. Article databases could be replaced with web-based collaborative workspaces where "publication" takes place in form of contributions to shared pieces of information. Instead of publishing study-based articles, scientists could produce contributions and provide reasonings, and evidence on phenomenon-based shared pieces of information.

If current publication practices are to be developed, changes in the scientific meriting system are also necessary. Instead of mere number of publications, merit should be awarded based on how much the collective knowledge base improved by scientific contributions. At least in some fields of science, merit should be awarded based on the societal relevance and impacts of research results.

Mikko Pohjola
Jouni Tuomisto