The Strain on Scientific Publishing - Response to: “Bad bibliometrics don’t add up for research or why research publishing policy needs sound science”

We have received a diverse, global, and humbling response to our preprint “The Strain on Scientific Publishing.” We thank everyone for the kind words, thoughtful commentaries, and critiques from across the spectrum. We embrace the opportunity to critically re-evaluate our positions and better our understanding of the data. This is Open Science at its best, and we fully support it.

A recently-published Frontiers Media “science news” blog commented publicly on our work. We read this piece with great interest, but were surprised to see this blog mischaracterize our work and the relationship we had with Frontiers in the lead-up to releasing our preprint. We feel the debate around our preprint is best left to the scientific discourse, including peer review; ultimately the worth of our work to the scientific community at large will be judged by the utility that it provides to understanding the academic publishing landscape.

However, we feel compelled to publicly reply to this blog piece as it contains factual errors, distorts our work, accuses us of editing, cutting and omitting data to produce biased results. These accusations are particularly hideous to make of scientists. Frontiers’ blog further produces an alternative analysis that partly does not stand up to scrutiny, and partly supports the very results it claims to debunk. 

Here we provide a response focused on the most salient points. We must reply to the claims made about our character seriously: we did not cut, distort, omit or edit any data. Here, we will set the record straight and dispel the derogatory accusations contained in Frontiers’ piece.

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