[Coral-List] What you need to know about publishing research articles

Sun Apr 28 12:53:43 EDT 2013

Dear Francisco:

I think you are missing the point (as are some of the others on Coral-List).

There are a large number of excellent society journals with long-standing reputations and well peer reviewed, and with sometimes modest publication fees to cover costs of printing and mailing to members (e.g. Coral Reefs, L&O, many others).  The costs of accessing work published in these journals is subsidized by the members of the scientific society, but it is not free.

There are a large number of professional journals published by large publishing companies and most of these (but not all) charge what can be substantial publication fees because they are for profit, but they also have publication costs to produce high quality hard copies (and that is expensive) and global distribution (e.g. MEPS, Mar Bio, and hundreds more in our field).

Both of these categories come in best, better, good and fair quality of science published in terms of rigor of review, and selectivity for "impact factor" (what I call the 'who cares' factor).  The more outstanding a given piece of research in terms of difficulty of execution and worthiness of the results and conclusion, the higher the quality of the journal the scientist aims for, and the more 'points' you get toward recognition as an outstanding scientist.

Yes, these journals cost money to subscribe to and/or to buy individual articles unless your institutional library subscribes for you.  But organizing and publishing these journals is not free or cheap, and so the people who want to publish and read the articles have to share the cost of doing so.  Some of these journals offer the researcher an option to pay the journal to make the particular article 'open access', but not every researcher has the funds to pay for that.

More recently there have arisen a number of open access journals such as PLoS One, etc.  These may be free to the reader but charge the researcher (some are quite expensive) who wants to publish in them; maybe some have obtained government or industrial sponsorships, to keep these page charges lower, not sure.  So here  the researchers have to pay to disseminate their findings, and usually people with grants request page charges in their grants to cover costs of publication.  Again, nothing in life is free and so somehow the system has to come up the funds to publish and disseminate research findings.  These 'free' journals also come in a variety of qualities, depending on how selective they are.

Most journals get more manuscripts submitted than they could publish even if every single one was worthy of publication.  The best journals get an even higher ratios of submitted to accepted for obvious  reasons.  As a past reviewer and journal editor, I can tell you a lot of really poor work gets submitted for publication and gets rejected for good reason.  Some submissions just need some additional work to get things right, and if the authors persist, they can usually correct the problems to get their paper accepted.

Now, one can quibble about which journal is best, and I will tell you flat out that some very poor, awful, poorly executed and really hyped work gets published in the 'top' journals (e.g. Science and Nature) because in the end, it is humans who manage the whole process, there are problems with band wagons and clicks in the peer-review process, and the system is not perfect (nothing humans do is).  But that doesn't mean that for the most part , the system works.

My impression is that this whole string of messages started because of many of us getting out-of-the-blue invitations to publish (and attend  scientific conferences) from a whole slate of unknown 'journals' that seem to have popped up like spring weeds in the past few years.  I have been told that there is a host of them in the mathematics field coming out of China, that will publish pretty much anything.  These are the ones you will not find listed in the objective journal evaluation systems, and that inexperienced scientists new to publishing need to be leery of.

So to answer your question, in a pragmatic way:  you should be doing science because you are inquisitive about how nature works and creative in figuring out how to answer the problems/questions you address, you'd be wise to choose problems to study that are meaningful in terms of both advancing our understanding of nature in a significant way as well as helping solve problems caused by man (i.e. helping society), and if you do both of these well enough you may end up getting a job that pays you to do your research.  In order to get that job, you had better be the best of the 100 or so people who apply for every research job that opens up, and you get that recognition of being the best by what work you have accomplished and which journals you have managed to get your work recognized in (i.e. published).

Alina Szmant

*************************************************************************
Dr. Alina M. Szmant
Professor of Marine Biology
Center for Marine Science and Dept of Biology and Marine Biology
University of North Carolina Wilmington
5600 Marvin Moss Ln
Wilmington NC 28409 USA
tel:  910-962-2362  fax: 910-962-2410  cell: 910-200-3913
http://people.uncw.edu/szmanta
*******************************************************

-----Original Message-----
From: coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov [mailto:coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov] On Behalf Of Francisco Soto
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2013 8:57 AM
To: RainbowWarriorsInternational
Cc: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
Subject: Re: [Coral-List] NYT Article on "Predatory Open-Access Journals"

Hi all:

Now that we have a list of the so-called "predatory journals", we need a list of the apparent "non-predatory journals" that don't charge scientists to be published, don't charge scientists when trying to access a certain paper and their institutions are not subscribed to the journal, but most important I would like a list of the "non-predatory journals" that actually make scientific articles available to the general public in ways science is actually understood by everyone and not just trained scientists.

My question as a young and emerging scientist is:

Are we doing science for the benefit of our society and nature or only for personal benefit and recognition?

Cheers,

Francisco J. Soto Santiago
Estudiante Doctoral
UPR-Río Piedras

El 04/26/2013, a las 4:54 p.m., RainbowWarriorsInternational <southern_caribbean at yahoo.com<mailto:southern_caribbean at yahoo.com>> escribió:

> The ISO norm would be very general indeed and per specific field it would state explicitly exactly what peer-reviewers already know so that this knowledge becomes openly accessible. What we do is make accessible for all the actual knowledge systems for science assessment, which includes the peer review processes for each field.
>
> The peer review processes are replicable and thus must be accessible for scrutiny. This is the very core of certification and accreditation, two processes which allow auditing using benchmarks.
>
> Science, like mathematics cannot be wholly formalized and contains elements and processes which rely on intuition, art and out of the box thinking.
>
> Peer review processes must be subject to some form of standardization.
>
> I know this is a very sensitive topic and I have had some offline comments that in essence tell me it cannot be done. Obviously the current state of affairs is not acceptable and in  view of the emergence of open science in need of some revision and at least soul searching.
>
>
> Milton Ponson, President
> Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
> (Rainbow Warriors International)
> Tel. +297 568 5908
> PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
> Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
> Email: southern_caribbean at yahoo.com<mailto:southern_caribbean at yahoo.com>
> http://www.rainbowwarriors.net
>
> To unite humanity in a global society dedicated to a sustainable way
> of life
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Ulf Erlingsson <ceo at lindorm.com<mailto:ceo at lindorm.com>>
> To: RainbowWarriorsInternational <southern_caribbean at yahoo.com<mailto:southern_caribbean at yahoo.com>>
> Cc: Héctor Reyes Bonilla <hreyes at uabcs.mx<mailto:hreyes at uabcs.mx>>; Magnus Johnson
> <m.johnson at hull.ac.uk<mailto:m.johnson at hull.ac.uk>>; "coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov<mailto:coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>"
> <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov<mailto:coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>>
> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 1:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] NYT Article on "Predatory Open-Access Journals"
>
>
>
> Milton,
>
> Although the idea of an ISO standard for research is interesting, I would be reluctant to buy into it since the very essence of scientific enquiry is to think freely. The norm would have to be so general that it would be rather meaningless, or specific for each subject field which also would make it little more than a rehash of what peer-reviewers already know. On a more philosophical level I don't think all religions are created equal, either; some are essentially knowledge systems inherited from generations past (though dressed in mythical terms), while others are belief systems. If we formalize science too much it might end up being just another religion a few thousand years from now.
>
> Ulf Erlingsson
>
> On 2013-04-26, at 11:30, RainbowWarriorsInternational wrote:
>
> No all open access journals are out there to make a fast buck. My organization is part of a group that actually wants to create an avenue of peer-reviewed open access journals for sustainable development issues accessible in as many languages as possible and with no cost to publish.
>>
>> Sounds impossible? Not really, the key is the "central registry" of intellectual property. I will not give away the business model for now, but it will work.
>>
>> Indeed the big problem is the "quality" of scientific publications, which traditional and expensive peer-reviewed journal publishers will be quick to tell is only guaranteed using their business models.
>>
>> There is no benchmarking for quality of science nor is there an ISO norm for conducting science? Doesn't the latter strike anyone as odd, that there are quality standards for virtually all human economic and social activities except scientific research (and religion)?
>>
>> We are in the process of preparing a position paper to send to the ISO to point out that the exercise of scientific research needs a map of ISO norms for all component activities and a framework quality standard for scientific research as a whole.
>>
>> In this process librarians will play a key role because they deal with all activities related to scientific research in terms of information and data storage, retrieval, access, query and processing, categorization, meta data, data mining etc.
>>
>>
>> Only in the practice of religion can we accept things on faith alone, every other human activity if it can be monetized, can be subjected to quality standards.
>>
>> Science should be no exception.
>>
>>
>> Milton Ponson, President
>> Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
>> (Rainbow Warriors International)
>> Tel. +297 568 5908
>> PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
>> Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
>> Email: southern_caribbean at yahoo.com<mailto:southern_caribbean at yahoo.com>
>> http://www.rainbowwarriors.net
>>
>> To unite humanity in a global society dedicated to a sustainable way
>> of life
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Héctor Reyes Bonilla <hreyes at uabcs.mx<mailto:hreyes at uabcs.mx>>
>> To: Magnus Johnson <m..johnson at hull.ac.uk<mailto:m..johnson at hull.ac.uk>>
>> Cc: "coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov<mailto:coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>" <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov<mailto:coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>>
>> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 10:29 AM
>> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] NYT Article on "Predatory Open-Access Journals"
>>
>>
>> Coral list, saludos.
>>
>> With all this situation of the "predatory journals", I believe that
>> the point is being missed, and that some perspective is needed..
>>
>> The problem here is not if open access is good in itself or
>> beneficial to scientists in developing countries, nor if the new
>> electronic journals should have a place in the world to exist. The
>> thing is that science needs (begs for...) quality. The only reason
>> science has been probably the most successful collective enterprise
>> in human history is that not everything is taken as is. We need
>> proof, evidence, and from that point on we move on. Each and every
>> day when all of us turn on a light or a computer or a tv, and the
>> machine starts, we can see how efficient science is. When the quality goes down, everything goes down.
>>
>> The new open access "journals" are not looking for a better world for
>> everyone, or to open lines for third world academics to flourish. The
>> editors just want to make a quick buck, either fooling young
>> scientists (I sincerely do not believe that a seasoned researcher is
>> unaware of which are the "good journals" and which ones not), or (the
>> worst case) play to the need to improve our income. Most people in
>> the developed world do not know that scientists in many countries in
>> Latin America or Asia are rated annualy by government agencies
>> depeding basically on the number of "international" papers that we
>> produce. If you pass, you receive a monthly stipend of about 1,000 to 2,500 USD, which practically doubles your salary.
>>
>> Before the "predatory journals", one had to do adequate research in
>> order to get published in good journals (basically, those in ISI or
>> other similar companies). Now, as the government "referees" simply do
>> not know the quality of the journals (they are NOT scientists), if
>> the paper is written in English or in a journal with a title in
>> English, it is valued equally as if it appears in Nature, MEPS or
>> whatever (I am exaggerating, but unfortunately, just a little
>> bit....). What is happening? Suddenly, many people who has never won
>> a competitive grant in their life and does field work or experiments
>> using a 6,000 USD yearly support of their institutions, is publishing
>> more papers and earning better salaries, jubilation money and
>> climbing faster in the academic ladder than those trying to obtain resources from each country´s science agency (equivalent to the NSF)..
>>
>> In short, maybe in developed countries the new open access journals
>> can be seen with some sympathy as they do not seem to hurt anyone,
>> but here in the south, things are quite different...
>>
>> ¡Saludos a todos!
>>
>> Hector Reyes
>> UABCS, La Paz
>>
>>
>>
>> 2013/4/25 Magnus Johnson <m.johnson at hull.ac.uk<mailto:m.johnson at hull.ac.uk>>
>>
>>
>> I agree - both have their place.  I subscribe and edit for the
>> wonderful Journal of Crustacean Biology (
>> http://thecrustaceansociety.org/Jrl-Crustacean-Biology.html) and
>> value the fact it groups papers together around a theme and
>> encourages me to read stuff I might not stumble upon otherwise.  I've
>> also recently started editing for PeerJ, an exciting new OpenAccess
>> venture (https://peerj.com/ ).
>>
>> I like both because they promote access to more people through
>> discounts for those from developing nations or self funded graduate
>> students and the latter allows anyone to view its contents.  I would
>> think this is particularly important for tropical research.
>>
>> I used to depend upon MEPS, a traditional journal for much of my
>> information but my university doesn't subscribe to the most up to
>> date volumes because it is so expensive.  I have to access it by
>> writing directly to authors.  That fact dissuades me from publishing in it.
>>
>> Cheers, Magnus
>>
>>
>> ____________________________________________________
>> Dr Magnus Johnson
>> Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences School of Biological,
>> Biomedical and Environmental Sciences University of Hull
>> http://www.marine-biology.org.uk/
>>
>> Associate Editor, Journal of Crustacean Biology,
>> http://www.thecrustaceansociety.org
>> Editor: Johnson M & Johnson M (2013) The Ecology and Biology of
>> Nephrops norvegicus (Adv. Mar. Biol.)
>>
>> Nephrops project: www.nephrops.eu<http://www.nephrops.eu>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>> --
>> Héctor Reyes Bonilla
>> Departamento Académico de Biología Marina Universidad Autónoma de
>> Baja California Sur Carretera al sur km 5.5. Col. El Calandrio La
>> Paz, B.C.S., C.P. 23080.
>> Tel.. (52-612) 123-8800, ext. 4160
>> Fax (52-612) 123-8819.
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