Why would you publish in Scientific Reports ?

The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is launching a fully open access journal called Scientific Reports. Like the recently launched Nature Communications, this journal is online only and the authors cover (or can choose to cover for Nat Comm) the cost of publishing the articles in an open access format. Where 'Scientific Reports' differs most is that the journal will not reject papers based on their perceived impact. From their FAQ:
"Scientific Reports publishes original articles on the basis that they are technically sound, and papers are peer reviewed on this criterion alone. The importance of an article is determined by its readership after publication."

If that sounds familiar it should. This idea of post-publication peer reviewing was introduced by PLoS ONE and Nature appears to be essentially copying the format from this successful PLoS journal. Even the reviewing practices are the same whereby the academic editors can choose to accept/reject based on their opinion or consult external peer reviews. In fact, if I was working at PLoS I would have walked into work today with a bottle of champagne and I would have celebrated. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. NPG is increasing their portfolio of open access or open choice journals and  hopefully they will start working on article level metrics. In all, this is a victory for the open-access movement and to science as a whole.

As I had mentioned in a previous post, PLoS has shown that one way to sustain the costs of open access journals with high rejection rates a publishers needs also to publish higher volume journals. Both BioMedCentral and more recently PLoS have also shown that high-volume open access publishing can be profitable so Nature is now trying to get the best of both worlds. Brand power from high-rejection rate journals with a subscription model and a nice added income with a higher-volume open access journals. If by some chance, founders force a complete move to immediate open access, NPG will have a leg to stand on.

So why would you publish in Scientific Reports ? Seriously, can someone tell me ? Since the journal will not filter on perceived impact, they wont be playing the impact factor game. They did not go as far as naming it Nature X so brand power will not be that high. It is similarly priced (until January 2012) as PLoS ONE and has less author feedback information (i.e. article metrics). I really don't see any compelling reason why I would choose to send a paper to Scientific Reports over PLoS ONE.

Updated June 2013 - Many of you reach this page searching for the impact factor of Scientific Reports. It is now out and it is ~3. Yes, it is lower than PLOS ONE's so you have yet another reason not to publish there. 

Do we still need pre-publication peer-review ?

A bit over a month ago Glyn Moody wrote a blog post arguing that abundance of scientific publishing outlets removes the need for our current system of pre-publication peer-review. The post sparked an interesting discussion here on FriendFeed.

Glyn Moody tells us that we have now:

"yet another case of a system that was originally founded to cope with scarcity - in this case of outlets for academic papers. Peer review was worth the cost of people's time because opportunities to publish were rare and valuable and needed husbanding carefully"

Since we have an endless capacity to publish information online Moody argues that there is no longer a need to pre-select before publication. We can leave that all behind us and do a post-publication peer-review that is distributed by all of the readers using all sorts of article level metrics that PLoS has been promoting.

More recently Duncan wrote another blog post that has some information that I think is important for this discussion. He was trying to estimate how many articles have ever been published. In the process he noted an interesting number - the number of articles that are currently published per minute. Pubmed keeps a table with the number of articles that they have information on per year. I don't think the last couple of years are well annotated and the first decades are that reliable so I just plotted here the totals between 1966 and 2007.

It is not surprising to see that the number of articles published per year is increasing, it probably matches well our expectations. I personally feel like I never have enough time to keep up with the literature. We are currently over the 700.000 papers per year. A search on pubmed for articles published in 2009 returns 848.856 papers. Something like 1.6 papers per minute !

So, although we have no scarcity of publishing outlets we have a huge scarcity of attention. It is very literally impossible to keep up with the current literature without some sophisticated filtering system. With all of the imperfections of our current System (TM) of editorial control, subjective peer review, subjective impact evaluations, impact factors and so on, we must agree that we need a lot of help filtering through these many articles.

I have read some people arguing that we should be capable ourselves of reading papers and realizing if they are interesting/innovative or not. That is fine for the very narrow range of topics that are close to our area of interest. I have pubmed queries for my topics of interest and I do filter through these myself without relying (too much) on the journal it was published on, etc. The problem is everything else that is not within this extremely narrow range of topics or the many papers that escape my queries. I want to be made aware of important new methods and new discoveries outside my narrow focus.

Moody and many others argue that we can do the filtering after publication by the aggregated actions of all of the readers. I totally agree, it should be possible to do the filtering after publication. It should be possible but it is not in place yet. So, if we want to do away with the System .. build a better system along side it. Show that it works. I would pay for tools that would recommend me papers to read. In my mind, this is where publishers of today should be making their money, in tools that connect the readers to what they want to read, not on content that should be free to read and re-use by anyone (open access).

Nature Communications serves its first papers

The new Nature brand journal (Nature Communications) has published its first set of papers this week. It is an interesting development in scientific publishing for many reasons. This is the first Nature brand journal that is online only and offers an (expensive) $5000 open access choice. Also, they are positioning this journal specifically as lower tier journal than previous Nature journals. According to the scope section:

"papers published in Nature Communications will be of high quality, without necessarily having the scientific reach of papers published in Nature and the Nature research journals."

So why is Nature dipping its toes in higher volume open access versus its typical market of highly selective closed access papers ? A bit of context might be required and some of the discussions from 2008 about the PLoS business model are worth revisiting. A few years ago, Declan Butler, a reporter from Nature, wrote an overly negative news piece about PLoS ONE which generated a huge online discussion (see Bora's link fest). Timo Hannay's reaction to this discussion was a much more balanced point of view from Nature's side of things. Essentially, Timo Hanny was pointing out that PLoS had failed to make a profit with their more selective journals and that it was showing that a lower tier of less selective journals are required to subsidize the higher tiers. Timo also said that PLoS was creating barriers to market entry for other OA publishers because they were using philanthropic grants to sustain their business.

So with this in mind, Nature Communications could be seen as bet hedging. Open access might be here to stay due to mandates from funding agency. If that is the case, the example from PLoS shows us that the only way to sustain highly selective journals is to publish also lower tier, less selective journals. This way the publishing house can also directly pass papers down its chain of journals and even possibly pass around the referee reports to expedite publishing.

If most publishers try to cover the whole range of journal selectivity how may publishers will there be a market for ?

While PLoS and Nature and expanding down this perceived pyramid of journal selectivity, BMC has been trying to expand up. This week, BMC Biology and Journal of Biology announced that these two journals are fusing to be the new flagship journal of BMC. I wish the best to the re-birth of BMC Biology but expanding up the ladder of "perceived impact" is much harder than expanding down.

Through this all we have still not managed to do away with this idea of journal prestige or impact. PLoS ONE promised us they would provide us with ways to filter and sort papers on their individual value but we are still not there yet. Ironically these "editorial" services might end up coming from third party programs like Mendeley, CiteUlike or Papers.

PLoS Currents - rapid dissemination of knowledge

PLoS unveiled recently an initiative they call PLoS Currents. It is an experiment in rapid dissemination of research built on top of Google Knol. Essentially, a community of people dedicated to a specific topic, could use PLoS Currents to describe their ongoing work before it is submitted to a peer review journal. They have focused their initial efforts to Influenza research where the speed of dissemination of information might be crucial.

The content of this PLoS Currents: Influenza is not peer reviewed but is moderated by a panel of scientists that will strive to keep the content on topic. There is a FAQ explaining in more detail the initiative. These articles are archived, citable, they can be revised and they should not be considered as peer-reviewed publications. For this reason, PLoS encourages authors to eventually submit these works to a peer-reviewed journal. It remains to be seen how other publishers will react to submissions that are available in these rapid dissemination portals.

PLoS Currents vs Nature Precedings
This initiative is somewhat related to the preprint archives like Nature Precedings and arxive. The main differences seam to be a stronger emphasizes on community moderators and the use of 3rd party technology (Google Knol). The community moderators, which I assume are researchers working on Influenza could be decisive factor in ensuring that other researchers in the field at least know about the project. Using Google Knol lets PLoS focus on the community and hopefully help them get the technical support from Google to develop new tools are they are needed. However the website currently looks a little bit like a hack, which is the downside of using a 3rd party technology. For example, we can click the edit button and see options to change the main website .. although obviously the permissions do not allow us to save these changes.

I think it is an interesting experiment and hopefully more bio-related researchers will get comfortable with sharing and discussing ongoing research before publication. I still believe this would reduce wasteful overlaps.  As usual, I only fear that more of these experiments tend to fragment the required critical mass for such a community site to work.

Jonathan Eisen@PLoS

PLoS has a new Academic Editor in Chief that blogs, works on evolution and has been at SciFoo twice. Jonathan A. Eisen, explains his reasons for accepting the job in an editorial available online. Among other things, he states:

Second, I want to work with the professional staff at PLoS Biology, the Academic Editors, and anyone else in the community who shares my desire to build new initiatives that will keep PLoS Biology as a top-tier journal. These would include ideas like producing issues dedicated to particular themes, actively recruiting excellent papers in fields where OA is not yet common, producing more outreach and educational material, and engaging bloggers and fully embracing the Web 2.0 world.

I actually would like to get a bit more involved with what they are doing at PLoS, in particular with what they might be discussing for PLoS ONE and the hubs. Maybe I can pester them later on during the year. For some reactions on the news and more information, here is the related Postgenomic cluster.

I wonder if we will ever see the AEIC of Science/Nature/Cell blogging :). The editorials are the closest article format to a blog post but they insist on a somewhat exaggerated formality. Just as an example here is a link to the 2007 archives of the (great) editorials of Frank Gannon from EMBO reports.

The right to equivalent response

(disclaimer: I worked for Molecular Systems Biology)

The last issue of PLoS Biology caries an editorial about Open Access written by Catriona J. MacCallum. It addresses the definition of Open Access and what the author considers an "insidious" trend of obscuring "the true meaning of open access by confusing it with free access".

I agree with the main point of the editorial, that we should keep in mind the definition of open access and that the capacity to re-use a published work should have more value to the readers.

However, it is very unfortunate that the very fist example MacCallum picks on is the Molecular Systems Biology journal for the simple fact that very recently they have changed the publishing policies to address exactly this issue. Authors can choose one of two CC licenses, deciding for themselves if they want to allow derivatives of their work or not. See post at MSB blog. As it is explained in the blog post the discussions about the licenses actually started several month ago and I think the final implementation is a very balanced decision on their part.

Thomas Lemberger, editor at MSB wrote a reply to the editorial that PLoS decided to publish as a response from the readers. These can only be seen if readers decide to click the link "Read Other Responses" on the right side of the online version.

I am obviously biased but for me this is not really giving the right to equivalent response. It would not have cost them much to issue a correction or publish the letter as correspondence where it would have the same visibility as the editorial. This would signal that they are indeed committed to collaborating with other publishers and journals that support open access (as stated in PLoS core principles).

Open-source architecture to house the world

Here is a very energetic talk (filmed in February 2006) by Cameron Sinclair hosted at TED talks. He is part of the Architecture for Humanity organization that promotes architectural and design solutions to global, social and humanitarian crises. A very inspiring example of how internet really makes the world small and how ideas like crowdsourcing and the open access to innovation can make a difference. The first time I heard about a creative commons house design.

They have started a project called Open Architecture Network to serve as hub for collaborative efforts.

Open Access in a different way

Just for fun I though I could try this new cartoon website. This was I got out in a couple of minutes :). Take a wild guess of what publishers I was thinking about.



View in the toon webiste

Petition for guaranteed public access

(via PLoS publishing blog):
"A group of European organisations - JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Denmark's Electronic Research Library) - have posted a petition to encourage the EC to formally endorse the open access recommendations."

This petition recommends that "any potential 'embargo' on free access should be set at no more than six months following publication" for any EC funded research.

Have a look and sign the petition if you are for it.