Schekman's 'luxury journal' boycott doesn't go far enough

Recipients of this year’s Nobel Prizes converged on Stockholm to receive their medals, dine with the King and Queen, and be treated like the scientific royalty. For most this time is, understandably, about them and their work. So bravo to my University of California Berkeley colleague Randy Schekman – one of this year’s recipients of the prize in physiology or medicine – for using the spotlight to cast a critical eye at the system that brought him to this exalted level ... I gave up publishing in Science, Nature, Cell and all other subscription-based journals when I started as a junior faculty at Berkeley in 2000, and have devoted immense amounts of time and energy over the ensuing 13 years to convince other scientists to do the same. I co-founded an open-accesspublisher – Public Library of Science (PLOS) – whose raison d’etre was to provide authors with an alternative to the big-name subscription publishers Schekman so rightly takes to task.  My career has flourished without publications in the 'big three', and PLOS is now a major player in the publishing world. But if Schekman’s announcement is big news, then it is a measure of just how far we have to go. The incentives to publish in 'high impact' journals still remain powerful ... I hope that Schekman will serve as inspiration – an example for others to follow. But, sadly, I suspect that will not happen. The world of academic publishing is deeply tied to how science is done. Journals are awarded an 'impact factor' based on how many other researchers cite their papers on average. Then career decisions – be it an application for a job or a grant – tend to be based on the impact factors of the journals researchers publish in, rather than on the quality of the science they do ..."