Pre-prints: just do it? | Reciprocal Space

"There is momentum building behind the adoption of pre-print servers in the life sciences. Ron Vale, a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UCSF and Lasker Award winner, has just added a further powerful impulse to this movement in the form, appropriately, of a pre-print posted to the BioarXiv just a few days ago. If you are a researcher and haven’t yet thought seriously about pre-prints, please read Vale’s article. It is thoughtful and accessible (and there is a funny section in which he imagines the response of modern-day reviewers to Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper on the structure of DNA). His reasoning is built on the concern that there has been a perceptible increase over the last thirty years in the amount of experimental data – and therefore work – required for PhD students to get their first major publication. Vale argues that this is a result of the increased competition within the life sciences, which is focused on restricted access to ‘top journals’ and is in turn due to the powerful hold that journal impact factors now have over people’s careers. Regulars readers will know that the problems with impact factors are a familiar topic on this blog (and may even be aware that their mis-use was one of the issues highlighted in The Metric Tide, the report of the HEFCE review of the use of metrics in research assessment that was published last week). Michael Eisen has written a sympathetic critique of Vale’s paper. He takes some issue with the particulars of the arguments about increased data requirements but nevertheless espouses strong support for the drive – which he has long pursued himself – for more rapid forms of publication. I won’t bother to rehearse Eisen’s critique since I think it is the bigger picture that warrants most attention. This bigger picture – the harmful effect of the chase after impact factors on the vitality and efficiency of scientific community – emerged as a central theme at the Royal Society meeting convened earlier this year to discuss the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication. At that gathering I detected a palpable sense among attendees that the wider adoption of pre-print servers would be an effective and feasible way to improve the dissemination of research results; (for more background, see proposal 3 towards the bottom of my digest of the meeting) ..."