Analysis and news
Prisoners of a system Vitek Tracz describes his perspective on the changes in the way researchers have communicated their findings over the last 100 issues of Research Information
It is not clear what is more dangerous, to summarise the past or to predict the future. To do that on a 16-year time span in both directions may end badly. Still, to celebrate the 16 years of Research Information, I will try.
This anniversary coincides with the most significant moment in my life as a science publisher (more than 40 years). I will try here to give a description of the significant changes in the way researchers communicate their findings, and consume the findings of others, that have happened over the last 16 years. I will follow by presenting the momentous changes in this process I expect to happen in the next 16 years; changes that we at F1000 propose and experiment with now. There are, of course, many others
inventing and proposing new ways in this area, and I admire many of them, but here I will concentrate on giving my personal perspective on where we have been and where we are going. Outcomes of the research by millions
of researchers worldwide is one of the greatest treasures of humanity. (UNESCO Science Report,
https://en.unesco.org/ node/252277, states that: ‘There were 7.8 million full-time equivalent researchers in 2013, representing growth of 21 per cent since 2007. Researchers accounted for 0.1 per cent of the global population.’ The benefit of all this research depends on the ability of researchers to communicate their findings effectively and responsibly, and the ability of others (researcher and anyone interested) to have easy, practical, full access to reports of research findings. I believe this process is badly flawed.
Researchers are not free to communicate their findings, and there are a multitude of barriers to accessing the findings of others. As a result, I suspect that a significant proportion of published research is false and should not have been published, and a significant proportion of research findings that should be published are not. The main reason for this sorry state of affairs is that researchers are prisoners of a system of reporting findings that is almost completely
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dependent on research journals, and the decisions that journals and their editors make. The reasons why this is so are (or should
be) clear to all. The career of a researcher depends significantly on which journals they publish their findings in, because funding for research and research jobs are decided by the easy-to-use check on the Journal Impact Factor. This almost absolute dependence on research journals is the prison in which most researchers, as authors, are forced to live, and it profoundly distorts published research. The life-changing role of the Impact
Factor to a researcher’s career skews what is published, because articles are selected by journals based significantly on the potential for generating citations, the measure by which the Journal Impact
“The career of a researcher depends significantly on which journals they publish their findings in”
Factor is calculated, and on which a journals’ success depends. Furthermore, access to the research published in research journals is commonly blocked to anyone who is not in a subscribing institution. The income of many major publishers of research journals depends on blocking access, and this creates both inequality and profound damage to the progress of research.
Until now: helping the readers A little over 16 years ago, I was involved with a group (including Harold Varmus and David Lipman of NIH, and researchers Mike Eisen, Patrick Brown, Paul Ginsparg and others) in initiating an alternative publishing model now known as open access. The idea was simple: previously, the cost of publishing the research findings was collected from the reader (or rather the institution representing the reader – the library) at the end of the process, which
was the only way possible when the only practical distribution was a printed journal. With the appearance of the World Wide Web, when one copy of an article could be accessed by all, we proposed that the costs be collected at the beginning of the process from the authors (or rather funders or institutions representing them) and make it available to all without restrictions. The first step was the creation of the first open access publisher, BioMed Central by me, and the first repository for open access published research reports, PubMed Central by NIH (National Institutes of Health). BioMed Central started with more than 30 journals in every major subject in biology and medicine. These were the first Open Access journals, which editorially operated exactly like any other research journal, but the difference was all articles published where available immediately to all, free and without restriction. A special licence was developed that protected the intellectual rights and integrity of the publication, but they could be accessed and shared freely. The beginning was very slow and
difficult. While many leading scientists supported the idea, it was hard to convince researchers to publish in new journals with no impact factors (it takes some years for a new journal to get an impact factor). Furthermore, publishers and societies whose profits depended on the income from subscriptions were trying to prevent the growth of the open access model. The major change happened when some major funders (NIH and Wellcome were the first) mandated that the research they fund had to be available freely to all after a year delay (this was in response to pressures from traditional publishers). But the benefits of open access to research and to society became increasingly clear over time. About two years after I established BioMed Central, the second open access publisher, PLOS, started – and, over time, many others. There seems little doubt to me that open
access will become the universal mode to publish research, even though there is undoubtedly still some way to go, and there are many problems created by manipulating the scheme by publishers, big and small.
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