Can we amend the laws of scholarly publication? | Reciprocal Space

"As part of its celebrations to mark the 350th anniversary of the publication of Philosophical Transactions, the world’s longest-running scientific journal, the Royal Society has organised a conference to examine ‘The Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication’. The first half of the meeting, held over two days last week, sought to identify the key issues in the current landscape of scholarly communication and then focused on ways to improve peer review. In the second half, which will be held on 5-6th May, the participants will examine the problem of reproducibility before turning attention to the future of the journal article and the economics of publishing ... The discussion on the first day – vividly live-blogged by Mike Taylor – was an attempt to define the challenges facing scholarly publishing in the 21st century and covered territory that will be familiar to anyone who has read up on open access. The debate kept circling back to the same basic point: the over-weening influence of impact factors and prestige journals, which have academics and publishers locked in an unhealthy relationship that seems increasingly unable to harness the opportunities presented by a digital world. It turns out that pretty much everyone can articulate the present difficulties – the hard bit is finding workable solutions ... ONE: Academics and institutions (universities, learned societies, funders and publishers) should sign up to the principles laid down in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). These seek to shift attention away from impact factors and to foster schemes of research assessment that are more broadly based and recognise the full spectrum of researcher achievements. Ideas for how to put such schemes in practice are available on the DORA web-site ... TWO: All journals with impact factors should publish the citation distributions that they are based on. The particular (and questionable) method by which the impact factor is calculated – it is an arithmetic mean of a highly skewed distribution, dominated in all journals by the small minority of papers that attract large numbers of citations – is not widely appreciated by academics. In the interests transparency, and to take some of the shine off the impact factor, it makes sense for journals to show the data on which they are based, and to allow them to be discussed and re-analysed. Nature Materials has shown that this can be done. I invite journals that might object to a move that would improve authors’ understanding and help to promote fairer methods of researcher assessment to explain their reasoning ... THREE: The use of open access pre-print servers should be encouraged. These act as repositories for manuscripts that have yet to be submitted to a journal for peer review and have the potential to short-circuit the delays in publication caused by the chase for journal impact factors ..."