Professional Publishing: An Issue at the Core of Mostly-Verifiable Research

August 26, 2024

This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

Most “information” pundits know little about the world of professional publishing. Some of the brands may be familiar; for instance, Cell, Westlaw, and Applied Physics Letters, among others. These are “must have” journals in some research libraries. Getting published in one of these publications is a professional certification of sorts. For a number of years I was on the editorial board of one of these professional publishers’ review team. Here’s what I learned:

I had zero idea if the write ups were horse feathers or a Hope diamond
The writing (grammar and syntax) was often terrible, easily the equal of the output of the undergraduates I taught when I was working on one of my totally important degrees in medieval poetry
The “authors” or alleged authors because some submissions had four, eight, even more co-authors had to pony up money to get the professional publisher to consider the paper
The professional publishers would charge the authors money to correct a proof or some intermediary version of a accepted write up.

Most professional publishers provide online and hard copy versions of their peer-reviewed and therefore really better than a blog post content. Some of these outfits are big and the ones able to survive the ups and downs of surfing on other people’s knowledge are making money. Assorted reforms have been rolled out. Cornell University is semi-enthusiastic about the arXiv initiative. There is “open access,” which wants to democratize access to “knowledge.” But the gold standard is moving from research to a big time journal. To accomplish this, the Google-type “pay to play” approach seems to be of considerable interest. Imagine that a pharma outfit wants to promote another drug “discovery” before getting approval and buying ads on CNN or Fox News. Marketing is marketing. Forget the academic hoo-hah.

“Author Paid Publication Fees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned” explains in scholarly terms the assorted sins of the pay to play model. A quick spin through the write up suggests some Google-type business machinations. Here’s one passage I found interesting:

The publication of low-interest work can be important to preserve important ideas whose time has not yet come—so-called “sleeping beauties”.But most low-interest papers are not sleeping beauties, and the publication of too many of these has the potential to harm the reputation of prominent journals. To avoid this, many publishers have launched lower-prestige gold OA journals that generate income from less newsworthy publications, while their more prestigious journals remain selective.

If you are interested in professional publishing, you may want to note the authors (one of them is hooked up with the spin out of Los Alamos National Lab which is known as the mother of the Santa Fe Institute. (LANL’s the place which experienced a problem with the disappearing hard drives from the photocopy machines.)

Let me offer several observations, which I have learned from LinkedIn members, can be quite upsetting to those who disagree with me. Hence, trigger warning:

In the current business environment, pay to play is becoming THE business model.
Research is often associated with “assistants.” Now that truism has to be modified to say, “With assistants (humanoid) and generative AI.”
The temptation or pressure to demonstrate how smart one is has created some interesting professorial behaviors; for instance, the Harvard ethics professor who allegedly violated Harvard ethics in a journal paper about ethics and the Stanford University president who resigned when it was revealed that he allegedly tap danced with Satan and recycled some research. (Was I surprised about Eric Schmidt’s comments which advocated some sporty activity? Nope. He delivered those remarks at a Stanford economics class and not more than a $10 Uber from Google’s offices.)

With regard to professional publishing and pay to play publishing: Is there a fix? Nope. The US culture has moved beyond ethical behavior in my opinion. I walked my French bulldog this morning and observed trash, street people trying doors, and a number of incorrectly parked vehicles. From the top of the knowledge pyramid to the lower tiers, behaviors have changed. As one over-rated American novel suggested, “You can’t go home again.”

Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2024

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Advertising, Business strategy, News, Publishing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.