The changing world of publishing and science

Category: Education

As a science graduate student, you must have gone through several articles. Have you ever cared to find out the first research article ever published in science (Isaac Newton’s paper on New Theory about Light and Colors in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first scientific journal in English) or tried to track down few articles published in the first five years since your research topic gained recognition in the world of science? Here are more examples, the first paper published in Nature and few more in the first issue of Nature. Try to go through these ancient looking papers once in your free time and compare them with the most recent published papers related to your subject. You not only will notice how different scientific publishing used to be then but you will also notice the way the science was “judged” then and how drastically it has changed in these years. These drastic changes in “judging the scientific work” have changed and are rapidly changing how science is “conducted” these days. I remember my supervisor telling me that when he was a PhD student some 30 years ago, even the smallest scientific discovery held a great value because he was a graduate student in the phase of “discovery.” So how is science now? What I saw and felt in my graduate years, which is not a long ago, that science today is not about “discovery” but it is about “presenting a new observation” and polishing a stale idea by using new tools. By that statement, I did not mean to hurt anyone’s feeling or meant that science is dying, but what I want to point out is how much the mindset of “publish or perish” is putting pressure on scientists and changing science today. Scientists are required to keep a steady publication record every year to save their career, which leads to submitting poor quality data, and the “business” model of the academic publishing is fueling this problem. Manuscripts are peer reviewed by a committee of scientists prior to publishing to maintain journal’s research quality standard. Usually, approximately 70% of submitted manuscripts are rejected. In recent years, the number of scientific journals have increased exponentially, resulting in competition among them to survive in the market. Reputed journals demand high quality research, which is not the case with emerging journals. Research produced by every lab in every university is not always of high quality, which results in manuscript rejections. Therefore, scientists seek to emerging, lesser known journals to publish whatever amount of data they have or portion their data to generate 2–3 small articles form one study. Surviving under the pressure of continual publishing and emerging scientific journals providing an easy way out has definitely changed the way science is conducted these days. However, universities following strict regulations to maintain a high standard research quality and the concept of “journal’s impact factor,” although debatable, regulate and validate the research quality at a certain level. As long as the pressure of “publish or perish” exists and publishing business does not undergo a reform, maintaining a high standard research quality is difficult.