@jonny Often it's also battling against the preconceptions of junior academics, reinforced by countless first-hand stories of their colleagues landing into the shortlist for an academic job on the basis of a preprint, but only receiving the offer for the job after submitting the acceptance letter for the manuscript in a glamour journal – and the senior academics clamouring that the latter is the essential part, when it is exactly NOT.

If at all, here is the call: you all, try to at least redirect juniors towards society glamour journals and away from Elsevier and Springer-Nature, both of which are for profit and very much not have your interests in their hearts.

#ScientificPublishing #academia

@jonny I'd explain the choices of academics from them being busy and not willing to read hundreds of papers by as many applicants to grants/positions/promotions, rather than cowards. The comfort, the ease, the simplicity, and for some, the beauty, of relying on journal prestige for evaluation instead of doing the actual work of reading the proposals and the scientific papers, and caring about the methods and the discoveries, not the pedigree, or the number of publications, or the journals they are published in. Takes work, also skill. And impartiality, integrity, and a certain detachment. All tall orders.

The day a scientist publishes great work in a blog post – or a preprint, is almost the same – and gets a job or a grant from it is when we'll know the future has arrived, and it's a matter of kindling it so as to extend to everyone else.

#academia #ScientificPublishing

@brembs @elduvelle

Indeed all that matters are individual papers, both for evaluation of careers but also for the perception (bias, really) that one develops of a journal.

A colleague of mine had the most thorough and toughest review process ever with a submission to PLoS ONE, but that was about a decade ago if not more.

I've published there twice too, and while the first time (2012) the editor only secured one review and it was as mild as it gets, the second time (2022) we got two and they were thorough and insightful. By this (dramatically undersampled) trend alone the journal has improved. Counteracting this, the emails I keep getting from editors requesting that I review papers well outside my field and that frankly look like the kind of manuscripts that should never be published in the first place suggests the journal has changed.

I loved the idea of PLoS ONE when it came out: it's pretty much what eLife is doing nowadays with Reviewed Preprints. But these initiatives require competent editors that care deeply, and reviewers that put in the time and effort. Doing so for for-profit journals like Cell Reports or Sci Adv is, in principle, harder: free labour for a company. I mean why would one ever do that.

#ScientificPublishing

@elduvelle A chief editor of a great journal recently told me that, given the high volume of published papers, papers in Science Advances, Cell Reports and PLoS ONE effectively aren't peer reviewed. These megajournals are cash cows and shouldn't be taken seriously.
#ScientificPublishing

The real blocker: ourselves.

Will be, as members of a grant panel or search committee, or grant reviewers, and as authors:

1. stop judging a paper by its publication venue;
2. stop providing subsidised labour to for-profit journals;
3. review only for non-profit journals;
4. send our manuscripts to journals aligned with our values of openness, data sharing, democratised access, diamond open access.

It’s really on us to stop this game of chicken.

#academia#ScientificPublishing

The real blocker: ourselves.

Will be, as members of a grant panel or search committee, or grant reviewers, and as authors:

1. stop judging a paper by its publication venue;
2. stop providing subsidised labour to for-profit journals;
3. review only for non-profit journals;
4. send our manuscripts to journals aligned with our values of openness, data sharing, democratised access, diamond open access.

It’s really on us to stop this game of chicken.

#academia#ScientificPublishing

Me, July 2023 (see picture for full quote) or click here:
https://davidlohner.de/a-fedi-vision/#:~:text=Research%20data%20and,the%20scientific%20community.

The Internet, March 2025: @encyclia
https://fietkau.social/@encyclia/114105968363302153

I like how this whole Academic #Fediverse is taking shape.

@ankrjoe @Lambo @brembs @neuSoM @melaniebartos
#academia #academicchatter#UnisImFediverse#UnisInsFediverse#Orcid#scientificPublishing