Nice work, Moin. As an editor myself for 5 years now, I love your suggestions. Not sure I love the preprint publication idea, but anything that minimizes having to find reviewers works for me!!
And does PNAS really not have a real review process? I cannot believe that.
But you are 100% correct that the review process for journals needs an overhaul. Especially since the COVID lockdowns, people are not reviewing as much as they used to. The system is coming apart at the seams.
They have two tracks, "direct submissions" that are submitted and reviewed as usual and "contributed submissions" that are only for NAS members, and they get to select their own reviewers. Nearly 100% acceptance rate for the latter. You should read this post of mine about PNAS and journal prestige: https://getsyeducated.substack.com/p/pnas-is-not-a-good-journal
In your post on PNAS, you seem to condemn it specifically for not having peer review. That may be a reason to condemn it, but here you ask to eliminate it to improve the peer review crisis. But since it does not have peer review, it does not contribute to that crisis.
I hold the opposite opinion: that its lack of peer review is a valuable source of diversity. Although I think it would be better to go back to the old system in which it did not even pretend to have peer review.
Asking for coherence among my posts may be too much! I kid, thanks for the comment. It is not that I condemn PNAS for its lack of peer review, per se, it's the combination of the facts that a) we highly value peer review; b) we highly value certain journals over others; c) PNAS has two tracks, one reviewed and one not, and many are not aware of this; and d) NAS members can/do abuse the system by publishing low quality studies with their students and colleagues as co-authors. I am no great fan of peer review, but I am even less of a fan of lack of transparency and playing games for the sake of prestige. I agree with you, they should just explicitly make it a society journal for NAS with no pretense of peer review.
Change might happen faster than you'd expect. Research funded by the Europen commission started their own open publication platform: https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/about You can submit your paper before peer-review.
Patience! :) As I've heard many eco-enthusiasts tell me: Sometimes, you need to believe in it for things to change - because if you don't believe in it, who will?
Except that the data show that there are now more eligible potential reviewers per paper than 10 years ago in all fields -- that is because we have larger teams authoring a larger amount of papers, but the team size has increased faster than the number of papers.
Nice work, Moin. As an editor myself for 5 years now, I love your suggestions. Not sure I love the preprint publication idea, but anything that minimizes having to find reviewers works for me!!
Seth! Been a long time, thanks for reading. Preprint-based systems are the future, get on the bus!!
And does PNAS really not have a real review process? I cannot believe that.
But you are 100% correct that the review process for journals needs an overhaul. Especially since the COVID lockdowns, people are not reviewing as much as they used to. The system is coming apart at the seams.
They have two tracks, "direct submissions" that are submitted and reviewed as usual and "contributed submissions" that are only for NAS members, and they get to select their own reviewers. Nearly 100% acceptance rate for the latter. You should read this post of mine about PNAS and journal prestige: https://getsyeducated.substack.com/p/pnas-is-not-a-good-journal
Of course. You’re a smart guy and your writing is really engaging. You might want to think about getting into academia!! 😂
In your post on PNAS, you seem to condemn it specifically for not having peer review. That may be a reason to condemn it, but here you ask to eliminate it to improve the peer review crisis. But since it does not have peer review, it does not contribute to that crisis.
I hold the opposite opinion: that its lack of peer review is a valuable source of diversity. Although I think it would be better to go back to the old system in which it did not even pretend to have peer review.
Asking for coherence among my posts may be too much! I kid, thanks for the comment. It is not that I condemn PNAS for its lack of peer review, per se, it's the combination of the facts that a) we highly value peer review; b) we highly value certain journals over others; c) PNAS has two tracks, one reviewed and one not, and many are not aware of this; and d) NAS members can/do abuse the system by publishing low quality studies with their students and colleagues as co-authors. I am no great fan of peer review, but I am even less of a fan of lack of transparency and playing games for the sake of prestige. I agree with you, they should just explicitly make it a society journal for NAS with no pretense of peer review.
Change might happen faster than you'd expect. Research funded by the Europen commission started their own open publication platform: https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/about You can submit your paper before peer-review.
Thanks for the comment! I actually have a co-authored paper in Open Research Europe (https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/3-22/v2). I agree, things are changing, just not as quickly as I would like. We'll see....
Patience! :) As I've heard many eco-enthusiasts tell me: Sometimes, you need to believe in it for things to change - because if you don't believe in it, who will?
Except that the data show that there are now more eligible potential reviewers per paper than 10 years ago in all fields -- that is because we have larger teams authoring a larger amount of papers, but the team size has increased faster than the number of papers.
Thanks for the comment. I don't know what data you are referring to. Do you have a link to a paper?