Workshop at Jena School for Microbial Communication, University Jena. Talk 1

1. Scholarly Publishing
transformations in times of
digital technologies
leonid.schneider@gmail.com
Twitter: @schneiderleonid
www.ForBetterScience.com
Leonid Schneider,
Independent science journalist

2. Outline
1. Brief history of scholarly communication
2. The money-making scheme
3. Open Access
4. Preprints

3. Before the internet and digital technologies
• Science was published in printed journals, mostly in black-and-white
• Universities and individual scientists subscribed to the journals of their choice
• Research data was sent as typed manuscripts, drawings and photographs
• If you wanted to read a paper, you either went to library or asked the
researcher for a reprint, by sending a postcard
Image source: Anurag Acharya

4. • Bad science also existed in those days (on smaller scale, there was less money to make with
science)
• Everything was based on trust (because how else do you dispute a sheet of printed text?)
• All criticism was an academic debate among gentlemen(because women,
society outsiders and foreigners were mostly excluded)
Before the internet and digital technologies

5. How Science grew
• Before science as such existed, there were two kinds of researchers: wealthy
and studied natural philosophers, and uneducated lower-class inventors or
medical practitioners
• Industrial revolution established science as tool of progress worth investing in
• With more and more money flowing, science became a profession for a
growing number of people
• There was always bias and fraud in science.
Same incentives: money and fame.

6. Internet and scholarly publishing
• Before internet, universities subscribed to print journals. Only the journals
librarians were interested in were ordered from publishers
• “In 1998, Elsevier rolled out its plan for the internet age, which would come
to be called “The Big Deal”. It offered electronic access to bundles of
hundreds of journals at a time: a university would pay a set fee each year”
• Universities now must buy every journal, good, mediocre, garbage,
pseudoscience, fraudulent, all in a bundle
• Internet boosted citations metrics technologies,
and Elsevier is market leader

7. $$$
Science as money-making industry
Paper-to-funding convertion
Funding used for research…

8. Journal model as industry
$$$
Paper-to-funding convertion
Funding used for research…
• Science is a product to be sold back to scientists
• The “better” the science, the higher
it can be sold

9. The Reputation Game
• Peer review was invented as an internal selection tool
• Originally in same way fiction literature is published: editor decides if he
(back then a man!) wants to publish the scientific papers in his society’s
proceedings.
• Only in mid-20th century external peer reviewers were invited to advice the
editor. Traditional peer review was born.
• Journals started to compete for “hottest” stories and relied on peer review as
tool of verification
• And scientists and society fell for it

10. $$$
Traditional
peer
review
The Holy Peer Review
Years and years of research…

11. - Journal Editors
- Decide on Quality,
Novelty, Impact
- Appoint peer
reviewers
- Make final decisions
- Peer Reviewers
- 1-4 people
- Unknown to authors
or readers
- Potential COI,
personal animosities,
lack of competence…
$$$
The Holy Peer Review
Years and years of research…

12. Peer review weeds out bad science. Really?
• Data is submitted on trust as
being honest/reliable
• Peer Reviewers are scientist
colleagues, not data integrity
specialists
• Peer Reviewers only analyse
science, not its data integrity
• Peer review is not always done
diligently enough
How did this pass
peer review????

13. Peer review is a tactical tool
• Editorial and peer review is often used as tactical tool to delay or prevent
publication
• Either to allow a scoop, or to suppress undesired results, or just to take
personal revenge
• Especially with Letter to Editor: your attempt to critically discuss a published
paper will be rejected because it “brings no novel insights”
• Same for experimental evidence that a published paper is wrong: “no novel
insights”
• Even correction or retraction requests get rejected:
journals want to uphold “reputation”

14. Peer-review plagiarism
• 20% of scientists do almost all the peer review all by themselves (study showed)!
• In reality, invited reviewers are busy senior scientists, who often outsource work to
postdocs and PhDs, while taking full credit. This is plagiarism.
• If you help with peer review:
ask to be named as contributor
• If boss asks you to do peer review alone:
ask to be appointed as official reviewer

15. The undeserved reputation
• Biological systems are very
complicated, but in biological
papers simplicity rules
• Why are elite journals not exposed
and abandoned then? Because
other journals emulate them!
• Reputation is metrics (impact
factor) and media presence.
Commercial journals win on both
fields

16. Journals and funding agencies prefer
simplistic “breakthrough” science
• Stem cells! Regenerative medicine! Organs from lab!
• Cancer cure!
• One-Gene-Phenotype models (Gene for autism! Gene for schizophrenia!)
• Microbiome causes autism or schizophrenia!
• Translational/Commercial potential (key in plant sciences!)
• Or just something totally crazy (e.g., arsenic bacteria)

17. Whither science?
• Paper validated by some peer reviewers, so others don’t have to
read it after it’s published?
• Are we writing papers for peer reviewers only then? What kind of
science is this?

18. The Paywall Problem
• Journals were published in print and hence had to be sold to
reader (university libraries)
• Subscription model was established, which then was used to
finance scholarly societies
• Bundle model makes every subscription journal profitable
• With commercial publishers in the game, subscriptions are used
to make businesses and investors rich
• Scientists can’t read papers beyond abstract and rely on journal
brand and peer review seal

19. Open Access to save the day?
• Open Access (OA) movement was born with
widespread Internet, in 1990ies
• Idea was to reduce publishing costs and make
papers accessible to everyone
• All science’s problems were thought to root in
inaccessibility due to subscription paywall
• In a way, OA is like communism ideology: it makes
wrong assumptions about economy and human
nature

20. The low-cost fallacy
• OA advocates still assume publishing costs nothing, especially in
times of internet
• Their theory is: because all my own papers are good, so are all
other papers
• Reality: many manuscript submissions are plagiarized, self-
plagiarized, salami-sliced, scientifically abysmal or fraudulent
• Quality control and copy editing costs money, it’s a full-time job
• Peer reviewer are indeed unpaid, but even academic editors
expect a honorarium

21. Predatory publishing
• OA is product of internet, and so is predatory publishing
• OA journals need to finance themselves in absence of
subscriptions. They charge authors instead of readers
• Supply side: without external funding, OA journals cannot
afford to be selective
• Demand side: Scientists want journals which accept their
papers fast, without hassle
• Predatory and vanity publishers arrive, not
just in OA, also in subscription bundles!

22. OA as mega-business
• Commercial publishers control the market
• They even create their own fake OA competition
• Non-profit community OA journals struggle to survive

23. Road to hell is paved with good intentions!
• same commercial publishers dominate
• same intransparent peer review
• Same obsession with metrics and brands
• Its costs to publish in OA, many scientists can’t afford it
• costs rise and rise, and it still costs to read
• Predatory behaviour both in OA and subscriptions

24. OA Mandates: Plan S
• Plan S designed by Robert-Jan Smits & Science Europe,
announced on 4.09.2018, to come in force in 2020
• cOAlitionS funders to force scientists to publish in full OA journals
only, other routes virtually impossible
• Subscription model to be abolished, learned societies to “bite the
bullet and go Open Access”
Marc Schiltz and Robert-Jan Smits Image source: EU Commission

25. Dysfunctional system to be replaced by utter mess?
• Scientists banned from publishing in journals they respect under
Plan S
• Learned societies depend on subscriptions and cannot flip to
author-pays OA
• Even some cOAlitionS signatory funders cannot afford OA costs
• Commercial publishers control the Plan S debate and they will
benefit

26. Preprints as a better way
Instead of mandating OA,
why not mandating preprints?

27. Publishing negative or contradictory results
Preprint instead of Letter to Editor!
• Your own manuscript can be published
online, gratis, with DOI before or
during submission to a journal
• Negative/contradictory results
welcome
• Preprints are not peer-reviewed
• Most biology journals accept preprints
and some even allow direct preprint
submission
• Biology preprint server is bioRxiv
• Preprints can be rejected for
plagiarism and non-research

28. Preprints in biology

29. Advantages of preprinting
• Your research is immediately available to the community and not months and
years after a publishing battle
• Scoop protection and publishing independence (for junior scientists)
• Preprinting can speed up publication process and prevent unjustified rejections
• You can add your “unpublished” work to your CV if you made preprints!
• Many preprints have already featured in science news, long before they were
published in a journal
• Some journals might reject your preprint if it featured in media (eg, Nature, Cell)

30. • Plant biologist, specializing on plant-
pathogen interaction
• ~50 papers flagged on PubPeer
• Investigations at CNRS and ETH
• Lost his lab in Strasbourg, barred by
CNRS for 2 years, EMBO withdrew Gold
Medal, funding by SNSF revoked +
funding ban
• some previously corrected papers
retracted when more came out
• 8 Retractions, 18 corrections
• Back in the saddle, right-hand man
Patrice Dunoyer got all the blame
Olivier Voinnet fraud scandal
Photo credit: Maigrot/REA

31. Vicki Vance
Professor of Botany, University of South Carolina
Voinnet paper overthrown by preprint
June 7, 2016
Editorial Gatekeeping at OA journal PLOS Pathogens
Manipulated Olivier Voinnet paper, science declared solid
Preprint saves the day

32. Thank you!
Website: forbetterscience.com
Slides: slideshare.net/LeonidSchneider/
Email: leonid.schneider@gmail.com
Twitter: @schneiderleonid