Digital Publishing Promotes Science and Popularizes it by Access to Scientific Discourse
Curator & Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
Article ID #6: Digital Publishing Promotes Science and Popularizes it by Access to Scientific Discourse. Published on 11/27/2012
WordCloud Image Produced by Adam Tubman
On the pages of this Open Access Online Scientific Journal we represent the interdisciplinary nature of Health and Disease, the science and the art to be mastered for enabling care delivery and development of therapies beyond the state of science in 2012.
While we agree with Dr. Douglas Field that there are 50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication and the irrevocable transformation of the Scientific Publishing Industry as we knows it, we disagree with Dr. Douglas Fields conclusion that Digital Publishing Is Harming Science.The transformation of the industry mirrors the millions of readers of Scientific Content been popularized by the social media and enabled technically by the ubiquitous nature of the WWW and content host and the Internet at a conduit of information.
More on the transformation of Scientific publishing
“Open Access Publishing” is becoming the mainstream model: “Academic Publishing” has changed Irrevocably
I will present below a DIALOG between two scientists on the Internet, LinkedIn Group: Pharmacology and Physiology
Dr. Lev-Ari, posted on 11/14/2012
Bloomberg News
My DNA Results Spur Alzheimer’s Anxiety at $12,000 Cost
Dr. Manjeet Sharma in Punjab, India had the opportunity to read the discussion and posted a Comment
People in my part of the world look into their horoscopes in order to get an idea of what life has in store for them. Going by this tendency, and also by the fact that many diseases have overtaken mankind today, I can understand this anxiety to know more about oneself since technology is now available to tell us about our genetic makeup. However, this technology is expensive and not in everyone’s reach. Fortunately most of us are spared the results of genetic decoding of ourselves! I think, genetic decoding should be done in extreme situations i.e if we have a family genetic defect or we are suffering from a rare genetic disorder etc. That means, it is diagnostic testing under defined circumstances. At least we can avail of the new technology to understand what we are suffering from. Otherwise, the results could be very depressing for most of us. If people dont know in advance about their susceptibilities, that manage to get through life fairly well. But if their minds are unnecessarily burdened with the load of latent genetic defects they will lose interest in normal life. Death is inevitable and people know it will happen to all of us someday. They have accepted this fate. But prior knowledge of vague genetic defects which may or may not afflict them in some stage of their life can be cruel, to say the least. I think, it should be resorted to, like most diagnostic tests, when the need arises and not otherwise. It can rob people of the joy of life.
Moreover, not everyone carries genetic defects.Most people carry epigenetic defects, congenital or induced by environment and these will not be picked up by these tests. They are more likely to succumb to epigenetic defects acquired during their lifetime.
Dr. Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN replied
Your perspective is valid. As scientist we must be objective and affectively neutral, thus respect different point of view to one’s own. Facing uncertainty may bring some to voluntarily subject themselves to a journey to minimize the uncertainty related to their’s future health and longevity, thus, in search for the sequencing of their genome to know what are the propensities to encounter health adversity.
Dr. Manjeet Sharma commented:
Your view is also valid. After all, we create novel methods to benefit humanity. Uncertainity is at the base of this quest, to know more about one’s future. But we run the risk of becoming fatalistic. If the gene profilig predicts negative aspects, we will lose the desire to live fully and search for ways and means to overcome the problems. However, these results are merely “predictive” in nature, when done at random. But done in the right diagnostic perspective these are justified. Only, I worry about the non-structural genetic defects which can be acquired without any genetic predisposition, merely because we are exposed to a million environmental carcinogens etc! These agents do not require perhaps a genetic predilection. However, it is good to have methods which can be very useful under the right circumstances,
Dr. Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN replied
Now, we are on the same page
Dr. Manjeet Sharma commented:
Coming back to my preoccupation with the “right circumstances”, I dont know how long are are your arms, but this technology would be very useful and pertinent in the farmers of Punjab in India. Punjab is my home state which was considered to be the food bowl of INDIA because this is where the green revolution came. The people were basically hard working, healthy and great foodies. The green revolution also brought in indiscriminate use of pesticides which have permeated soil and water.Unfortunately, the residues have entered the human system too so much so that 1in 10 farmers and their families suffer from cancers now! Even the sperm DNA of males is degenerate! Babies are born with congenital defects and pediatric cancers Their is no facility in our state for cancer treatment with the result that patients have to travel far for free treatment. Did they deserve this dreadful fate? They did not carry cancer susceptibility in their genes earlier but now? I wish you would use your influence to send teams from the west who would use this technology on our people. The authorities would learn a lot and perhaps will ban pesticides in future. Can you help?
Dr. Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN replied:
May I suggest that you will contact the Huffington Post and report that exchange and ask them to cover this topic and sent to Punjab a Team of Reporters to cover and activate POLICY MAKERS and the World Bank. You will be a whistle blower and make a big contribution to society.
Dr. Manjeet Sharma commented:
Now I can say that we are on the same page at last! Can you tell me how to contact the Huflington post to report this exchange? I am glad that you are not merely paying lip service. Thanks. manjeet
Dr. Lev-Ari replied
I am looking into it, We will ocntact you.
On 11/27/2012, Dr. Lev-Ari, contacted The Huffington Post for a Science Reporter to interview Dr. Sharma and write an article on the topic described in her e-mail exchange with Dr. Lev-Ari
50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication
and the Statements, Dr. Lev-Ari opposes to:
Digital Publishing Is Harming Science
Douglas Fields
Neurobiologist and author, ‘The Other Brain’
wrote on 11/19/2012 in the Huffington Post, Science Section
50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science
Posted: 11/19/2012 6:27 pm
Newsweek is dead. But we have Twitter. Harper-Collins just closed its last warehouse of books in the United States. Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher of scholarly books and journals in the world, printing continuously since 1584, ceased printing operations this year and will outsource printing to another company. The Press survived tumultuous changes since the Middle Ages — the coming and going of plagues, the rise and fall of empires, wars and famine — but it could not sustain itself in the new environment of digital publication and self-publication that the electronic medium feeds. Most people are acutely aware of the devastation of print journalism by the rise of digital media, but most people are oblivious to the consequences that the same upheaval is having on scientific publication. There is no science without scholarly publication, and scholarly publication as we have known it is dying.
As readers witness their daily newspapers thin, wither away and die, citizens worry about the digital tidal wave sweeping away the once-vigorous independent press. Many fear that one of the three vital legs of democracy is buckling under the combined weight of government power, ruthless capitalistic self-interest and an uninformed public. Scientific publication is undergoing a drastic transformation as it passes deeper into government and capitalistic control, while weakened from struggling simultaneously to cope with unprecedented transformations brought about by electronic publication.
The Final Step in the Scientific Method: Publication
A scientific discovery is useless if it is not communicated with authority to the scientific community. For centuries scientists submitted their research findings for publication in scientific journals that were run by the leading scientists with expertise in a specialized field who served as journal editors. The editors evaluated the submission, and if the findings appeared to be important and technically sound, they sought out other scientists around the world with recognized expertise in the area to read the manuscript critically and advise the editor and authors (anonymously) on its suitability for publication.
This process is essential to root out poor science and pseudoscience, and to prevent bogging down the advancement of science by cluttering the literature with contradictory and erroneous findings. The expert peer reviewers evaluated the potential strengths, weaknesses, technical flaws, significance and novelty of the finding, and they suggested the need for further experiments. If the study failed to be accepted for publication by the editor, the authors benefited from the editorial review process, and they revised their work for submission to another journal. Recent government-mandated changes in scientific publishing are undermining this critical process of validation in scientific publication.
The End of Scientific Publication as We Have Known It
Two transformational changes in scientific publishing are undermining the traditional system of scientific publication: mandated open access and electronic publication. The federal government has mandated that scientific research that is funded in part by federal grants be made freely available to anyone over the Internet. As most scientific research receives some public funding, this mandate affects most biomedical science conducted in the United State and, through international collaborations, much of the science conducted in Europe and Asia. The well-intentioned reasoning of the mandate is that if the research is supported by public funds, then the public should have the right to obtain the published results free of charge. The idea sounds great, but nothing is free.
In traditional scientific publication, after a manuscript was accepted by the editor, it was passed to the production department. Here, as at any book, magazine or newspaper publisher, the text was copyedited and typeset, figure layouts were determined, the article was proofread and, often with much back-and-forth communication between author and publisher, the new study was incorporated into an issue with other papers and printed, bound and delivered to subscribers around the world. Individual articles of general importance were publicized through press releases penned by professional science writers and distributed to the popular media. The journal was marketed to scientists and libraries to attract a wide readership. In this way the quality of the journal was validated by its readers. If the journal consistently published important and accurate studies, subscriptions would rise, income would increase and authors would strive to publish in those prestigious journals.
All this requires a highly educated and expensive workforce. Even as scientific journals (like magazines) transition entirely to digital publication, most of these costs and new ones unique to electronic publication must be paid. The government mandate, however, undercuts all the investment involved in validating and publishing the research studies it funds.
In the absence of income derived from subscriptions, scientific journals must now obtain the necessary funds for publication by charging the authors directly to publish their scientific study. The cost to authors ranges from $1,000 to $3,000 or more per article. Scientists must publish several articles a year, so these costs are substantial.
The funding model fueling open-access publication is a modern rendition of the well-known “vanity” model of publication, in which the author pays to have his or her work printed. The same well-appreciated negative consequences result when applied to scientific publication. Because the income is derived from the authors rather than from readers, the incentive for the publisher is to publish as much as possible, rather than being motivated by a primary concern for quality and significance that would increase subscription by readers, libraries and institutions and thus income. In the open-access, “author-pays” financial model, the more articles that are published, the more income the publishers collect.
In place of rigorous peer review and editorial oversight by the leading scientists in the field, these publishers are substituting “innovative” approaches to review submissions, or they apply no authoritative review at all. Some open-access journals ask reviewers to evaluate only whether the techniques used in the study are valid, rather than judging the significance or novelty of the findings. Others replace rigorous, anonymous peer review from the best experts in the field with open review online where the critics must identify themselves. Anonymous reviewers can be more critical without fear of retribution. Many such open-access journals have no focus, publishing anything in any field of science. Working scientists serving as editors are being replaced by staff who, like factory managers, serve to facilitate production. Nearly all this published material is dumped into the government-run PubMed and PubMed Central biomedical indexes. At one time it took years for a new journal to prove itself before PubMed would index the journal, but not now. PubMed, once the authoritative index of biomedical publication, is now apparently competing with Google Scholar.
Thus we have seen an explosion of open-access scientific publishers around the world soliciting articles for rapid publication online for a fee. I receive direct email solicitations to contribute articles to such journals almost daily now. I have never heard of most of these journals. Weekly I receive formal invitations to speak at an “international conference,” the proceedings of which will be published in an open-access journal. The production tasks are now done by the author without traditional support for copyediting, etc. The production is replaced by automated desktop publishing systems that allow the author to put their text and figures into the journal’s template upon submission.
Validation by Consensus
The argument is made that the loss of rigorous scrutiny and validation provided by the traditional subscription-based mechanism of scientific publication will be replaced by the success of an article in the market after it is published — it’s the “cream-will-rise-to-the-top” theory. What if, rather than ceasing printing, Newsweek had adopted this “author-pays” mode of open-access publishing? The ploy would have sustained the magazine financially, generating profitable income from authors of every persuasion, advancing special interests and others eagerly paying to fill the pages of Newsweek with their articles. Readers would have been left to sort out the worthy from the unsound. The same situation is faced by readers of many open-access scientific journals. Now when a scientist writes up new research for publication in a prestigious journal, he or she must deal with all the contradictory findings of questionable rigor and accuracy being published by these vanity-publishing, open-access journals.
Similar changes are eroding literary publication as direct electronic publication by authors on the Internet has led to erotic and reportedly pornographic works like Fifty Shades of Grey and spinoffs sweeping bestsellers lists for months. The issue is not whether erotica or pornography is or should be popular; rather, one wonders what literary work might have filled those slots on the bestsellers lists if traditional mechanisms of editor-evaluated publication had been applied, which consider more than simply the potential popularity of a work in deciding what to publish.
Scientific publishing is fundamentally different. Science has profound consequences for society that go well beyond the entertainment value or popularity of a publication or its business profits. Scientists and the public are rightfully outraged and we all suffer when flawed scientific studies are published. Even with the most rigorous review at the best journals, flawed studies sometimes slip through, such as the “discovery” of cold fusion published in Science, but it is the rarity of this lapse that makes this so sensational when it happens. With the new open-access model of author-financed publication, the “outstanding” is drowned in a flood of trivial or unsound work. Open-access publishing threatens to become scientific publication’s equivalent of blogging. (Nothing wrong with blogging, but it is not the same thing as scientific publication.)
Well-Intentioned but Twisted Logic
The logic for this government mandate is peculiar. Why do this to science? The scientific journals claim no rights to the results of publicly funded scientific research; they only seek financial compensation for the expenses required for editing, reviewing and producing the article to validate and disseminate the findings as effectively as possible. The government can and does make results of government-funded research freely available through its own publication resources, but such publications from the government printing office lack the scrutiny and validation provided by expert scientists and editors at scientific journals who rigorously and independently evaluate the research.
Do we want a government-run system in which the money for research is supplied by the same body that validates and publishes it? Would you feel confident in a government-run study on a new drug from the pharmaceutical industry made freely available from a government Internet site, or would you want that research rigorously and independently evaluated by expert and impartial scientists before it was published in a scientific journal with an established authority in the field? It is the government that now pays the publication costs for the research it funds. The authors must use the taxpayer money obtained from government research grants to pay the publication costs now required by mandated open-access publishing rather than use these precious dollars to pay for research supplies. Now the public must foot the bill for what was previously paid by subscribers of journals.
Why does this twisted logic apply only to science? Newspapers thrive on publishing publicly financed political processes. By the same reasoning, shouldn’t the political results, including outcomes of elections and other publicly funded political activities, be made freely available by newspapers and TV rather than allowing the media to charge for publishing it? If you accept this, what would become of independent and rigorous review of the results of any publicly funded political processes?
The End of an Era
The same thing that is happening to newspaper and magazine publishers is happening to science publishers. A few large publishing corporations with clout are consolidating power. These operations can exploit the new environment and build monopolies, but many scientific journals and scholarly publishers will fail. New journals are often inspired by working scientists seeing a new field of science emerging, which is as yet unknown by others. These new journals may not launch into the present turbulence. A corporate/government financial alliance is replacing scholarly publication once organized and run by scientists and academics.
I appreciate that there are benefits to digital print, open access and self-publication. My intent here is not to provide a balanced argument but to alert readers to dangers that I feel have not received adequate attention. This is not an abstract issue for me, and I openly declare my bias. Neuron Glia Biology was a scientific journal that was launched in 2004 by me and like-minded scientists to advance scientific research on neuron-glia interactions, and it was published by Cambridge University Press until this year.Neuron Glia Biology provided the opportunity for 1,400 authors to introduce their new research on neuron-glia interactions into the scientific literature, and it helped advance a new field of science, but no longer. One wonders how many new advances in science will never have an opportunity to take root now that scientific publication is an increasingly corporate and government business rather than the scholarly academic activity that it was for centuries. Science is advanced by scientific publication. These changes in publishing will affect the future of science profoundly.
SOURCE:
2012pharmaceutical
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