Why do people publish in Scientific Reports?
April 25, 2020
In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature, is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, the pointless abbreviating of author names and journal titles.
This is particularly odd when you consider the prices of the obvious alternative megajournals:
- PeerJ: $1,195 APC (or free if authors are members)
- PLOS ONE: $1,695 APC
- Scientific Reports: $1,870 APC
So to have your paper published in Scientific Reports costs 10% more than in PLOS ONE, or 56% more than in PeerJ; and results in an objectively worse product that slices the paper up and dumps chunks of it in the back lot, compresses and combines the illustrations, and messes up the narrative.
So why would anyone choose to publish in it?
Well, the answer is depressingly obvious. As a colleague once expressed it to me “until I have a more stable job I’ll need the highest IFs I can pull off to secure a position somewhere“.
It’s as simple as that. PeerJ‘s impact factor at the time of writing is 2.353; PLOS ONE‘s is 2.776; That of Scientic Reports is 4.525. And so, it in the idiotic world we live in, it’s better for an author’s career to pay more for a worse version of his article in Scientific Reports than it is to pay less for a better version in PeerJ or PLOS ONE. Because it looks better to have got into Scientific Reports.
BUT WAIT A MINUTE. These three journals are all “megajournals”. They all have the exact same editorial criteria, which is that they accept any paper that is scientifically sound. They make no judgement about novelty, perceived importance or likely significance of the work. They are all completely up front about this. It’s how they work.
In other words, “getting into” Scientific Reports instead of PeerJ says absolutely nothing about the quality of your work, only that you paid a bigger APC.
Can we agree it’s insane that our system rewards researchers for paying a bigger APC to get a less scientifically useful version of their work?
Let me say in closing that I intend absolutely no criticism of Daniel Vidal or his co-authors for placing their Spinophorosaurus posture paper in Scientific Reports. He is playing the ball where it lies. We live, apparently, in a world where spending an extra $675 and accepting a scientifically worse result is good for your career. I can’t criticise Daniel for doing what it takes to get on in that world.
The situation is in every respect analogous to the following: before you attend a job interview, you are told by a respected senior colleague that your chances of getting the post are higher if you are wearing designer clothing. So you take $675 and buy a super-expensive shirt with a prominent label. If you get the job, you’ll consider it as bargain.
But you will never have much respect for the search committee that judged you on such idiotic criteria.
Scientific Reports is an objectively bad journal
April 25, 2020
As I was figuring out what I thought about the new paper on sauropod posture (Vidal et al. 2020) I found the paper uncommonly difficult to parse. And I quickly came to realise that this was not due to any failure on the authors’ part, but on the journal it was published in: Nature’s Scientific Reports.
A catalogue of pointless whining
A big part of the problem is that the journal inexplicably insists on moving important parts of the manuscript out of the main paper and into supplementary information. So for example, as I read the paper, I didn’t really know what Vidal et al. meant by describing a sacrum as wedged: did it mean non-parallel anterior and posterior articular surfaces, or just that those surfaces are not at right angles to the long axis of the sacrum? It turns out to be the former, but I only found that out by reading the supplementary information:
The term describes marked trapezoidal shape in the
centrum of a platycoelous vertebrae in lateral view or in the rims of a condyle-cotyle (procoelous or opisthocoelous) centrum type.
This crucial information is nowhere in the paper itself: you could read the whole thing and not understand what the core point of the paper is due to not understanding the key piece of terminology.
And the relegation of important material to second-class, unformatted, maybe un-reviewed supplementary information doesn’t end there, by a long way. The SI includes crucial information, and a lot of it:
- A terminology section of which “wedged vertebrae” is just one of ten sub-sections, including a crucial discussion of different interpretation of what ONP means.
- All the information about the actual specimens the work is based on.
- All the meat of the methods, including how the specimens were digitized, retro-deformed and digitally separated.
- How the missing forelimbs, so important to the posture, were interpreted.
- How the virtual skeleton was assembled.
- How the range of motion of the neck was assessed.
- Comparisons of the sacra of different sauropods.
And lots more. All this stuff is essential to properly understanding the work that was done and the conclusions that were reached.
And there’s more: as well as the supplementary information, which contains six supplementary figures and three supplementary tables, there is an additonal supplementary supplementary table, which could quite reasonably have gone into the supplementary information.
In a similar vein, even within the highly compressed actual paper, the Materials and Methods are hidden away at the back, after the Results, Discussion and Conclusion — as though they are something to be ashamed of; or, at best, an unwelcome necessity that can’t quite be omitted altogether, but need not be on display.
Then we have the disappointingly small illustrations: even the “full size” version of the crucial Figure 1 (which contains both the full skeleton and callout illustrations of key bones) is only 1000×871 pixels. (That’s why the illustration of the sacrum that I pulled out of the paper for the previous post was so inadequate.)
Compare that with, for example, the 3750×3098 Figure 1 of my own recent Xenoposeidon paper in PeerJ (Taylor 2018) — that has more than thirteen times as much visual information. And the thing is, you can bet that Vidal et al. submitted their illustration in much higher resolution than 1000×871. The journal scaled it down to that size. In 2020. That’s just crazy.
And to make things even worse, unrelated images are shoved into multi-part illustrations. Consider the ridiculousness of figure 2:
Vidal et al. (2020: figure 2). The verticalization of sauropod feeding envelopes. (A) Increased neck range of motion in Spinophorosaurus in the dorso-ventral plane, with the first dorsal vertebra as the vertex and 0° marking the ground. Poses shown: (1) maximum dorsiflexion; (2) highest vertical reach of the head (7.16 m from the ground), with the neck 90° deflected; (3) alert pose sensu Taylor Wedel and Naish13; (4) osteological neutral pose sensu Stevens14; (5) lowest vertical reach of the head (0.72 m from the ground at 0°), with the head as close to the ground without flexing the appendicular elements; (6) maximum ventriflexion. Blue indicates the arc described between maximum and minimum head heights. Grey indicates the arc described between maximum dorsiflexion and ventriflexion. (B) Bivariant plot comparing femur/humerus proportion with sacrum angle. The proportion of humerus and femur are compared as a ratio of femur maximum length/humerus maximum length. Sacrum angle measures the angle the presacral vertebral series are deflected from the caudal series by sacrum geometry in osteologically neutral pose. Measurements and taxa on Table 1. Scale = 1000 mm.
It’s perfectly clear that parts A and B of this figure have nothing to do with each other. It would be far more sensible for them to appear as two separate figures — which would allow part B enough space to convey its point much more clearly. (And would save us from a disconcertingly inflated caption).
And there are other, less important irritants. Authors’ given names not divulged, only initials. I happen to know that D. Vidal is Daniel, and that J. L. Sanz is José Luis Sanz; but I have no idea what the P in P. Mocho, the A in A. Aberasturi or the F in F. Ortega stand for. Journal names in the bibliography are abbreviated, in confusing and sometimes ludicrous ways: is there really any point in abbreviating Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology to Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol?
The common theme
All of these problems — the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, even the abbreviating of author names and journal titles — have this in common: that they are aping how Science ‘n’ Nature appear in print.
They present a sort of cargo cult: a superstitious belief that extreme space pressures (such as print journals legitimately wrestle with) are somehow an indicator of quality. The assumption that copying the form of prestigious journals will mean that the content is equally revered.
And this is simply idiotic. Scientific Reports is an open-access web-only journal that has no print edition. It has no rational reason to compress space like a print journal does. In omitting the “aniel” from “Daniel Vidal” it is saving nothing. All it’s doing is landing itself with the limitations of print journals in exchange for nothing. Nothing at all.
Why does this matter?
This squeezing of a web-based journal into a print-sized pot matters because it’s apparent that a tremendous amount of brainwork has gone into Vidal et al.’s research; but much of that is obscured by the glam-chasing presentation of Scientific Reports. It reduces a Pinter play to a soap-opera episode. The work deserved better; and so do readers.
References
- Taylor, Michael P. 2018. Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur. PeerJ 6:e5212. doi: 10.7717/peerj.5212
- Vidal, Daniel, P Mocho, A. Aberasturi, J. L. Sanz and F. Ortega. 2020. High browsing skeletal adaptations in Spinophorosaurus reveal an evolutionary innovation in sauropod dinosaurs. Scientific Reports 10(6638). Indispensible supplementary information at https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-020-63439-0/MediaObjects/41598_2020_63439_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
doi:10.1038/s41598-020-63439-0
Matt’s Brachiosaurus in the wild
February 16, 2020
No, not his new Brachiosaurus humerus — his photograph of the Chicago Brachiosaurus mount, which he cut out and cleaned up seven years ago:
This image has been on quite a journey. Since Matt published this cleaned-up photo, and furnished it under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC By) licence, it has been adopted as the lead image of Wikipedia’s Brachiosaurus page [archvied]:
Consequently (I assume) it has now become Google’s top hit for brachiosaurus skeleton:
Last Saturday, Fiona and I went to Birdland, a birds-only zoo in the Cotswolds, about an hour away from where we live. The admission price also includes “Jurassic Journey”, a walking tour of a dozen or so not-very-good dinosaur models. In an interpretive centre in this area, I found this Brachiosaurus skeletal reconstruction stencilled on the wall:
I immediately knew it was the Chicago mount due to the combination of Giraffatitan anterior dorsals and Brachiosaurus posterior dorsals; but I found it more hauntingly familiar than that. A quick hunt turned up Matt’s seven-year-old post, and when I told Matt about my discovery he filled me in on its use in Wikipedia.
So this is 99% of a good story: we’re delighted that this work is out there, and has resulted in a much better Brachiosaurus image at Birdland than the rather sad-looking Stegosaurus next to it. The only slight disappointment is that I couldn’t find any sign of credit, which they really should have included given that Matt put the image out under CC By rather than in the public domain.
But as Matt said: “Even though I didn’t get credited, I’m always chuffed to see my stuff out in the world.” So true.
Tutorial 19g: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 7: why your open-access journal should use the CC By licence
October 15, 2019
Matt and I are about to submit a paper. One of the journals we considered — and would have really liked in many respects — turned out to use the CC By-NC-SA license. This is a a very well-intentioned licence that allows free use except for commercial purposes, and which imposes the same licence on all derivative works. While that sounds good, there are solid reasons to prefer the simpler CC By licence. I wrote to the journal in question advocating a switch to CC By, and then I thought the reasoning might be of broader interest. So here’s what I wrote, lightly edited.
First, CC By neatly expresses the one requirement all academics have of their work: that they get credit for it. When we publish papers, we are happy for them to be freely distributed, but also want people to build on them, re-using parts in whatever way helps, provided we’re credited — and that is exactly what CC By enables.
Second, because of this, many funders that require the work their grantees do to be published open access specifically require the CC By licence, in the expectation that it will provide the greatest societal benefit in exchange for their investment. Most famously, this is the case for the Gates Foundation (the largest private foundation in the world), but for a partial list of the many other funders with this policy, see https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/funding/funders-requiring-cc-by-for-articles — funders whose grantees, as things stand, are not allowed to publish their work in your journal.
Third, CC By is almost universal among well established and respected open-access journals, including all the PLOS journals, PeerJ, the BioMed Central journals, the Hindawi journals, eLIFE, Nature’s Scientific Reports, and palaeo journals such as Acta Palaeontologica Polonica and Palarch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. This is important because CC By-licenced journals can’t freely use material published under more restrictive licences such as your journal’s CC By-NC-SA. Instead, authors of such articles must labouriously seek exemptions from the copyright holders of the material they wish to reuse or adapt.
Fourth and last, other online resources also use CC By (or optionally CC By-SA in the case of Wikipedia), which means that, while material from PLOS ONE, Scientific Reports et al. can be freely used in Wikipedia articles, text and illustrations from articles in your journal cannot, limiting its use in outreach. Similarly, even on our own palaeontology blog, we would have concerns about using By-NC-SA materials as we use Patreon to solicit donations and our blog is arguably therefore commercial. (Part of the problem with the NC clause is that there is no rigorous definition of “commercial”.)
For all these reasons, we believe that your journal would better serve its authors, its readers, the academic community and broader society if its articles were published under the CC By licence. We hope that, if you agree, you are able to some point to help the journal make this transition. And if there’s anything Matt or I can do to assist that process, we’ll be happy to.
Our vertebral orientation paper is up as a preprint
September 30, 2019
Regular readers will remember that we followed up our 1VPC talk about what it means for a vertebra to be horizontal by writing it up as a paper, and doing it in the open. That manuscripts is now complete, and published as a preprint (Taylor and Wedel 2019).
Taylor and Wedel (2018: Figure 5). Haplocanthosaurus sp. MWC 8028, caudal vertebra ?3, in cross section, showing medial aspect of left side, cranial to the right, in three orientations. A. In “articular surfaces vertical” orientation (method 2 of this paper). The green line joins the dorsal and ventral margins of the caudal articular surface, and is oriented vertically; the red line joins the dorsal and ventral margins of the cranial articular surface, and is nearly but not exactly vertical, instead inclining slightly forwards. B. In “neural canal horizontal” orientation (method 3 of this paper). The green line joins the cranial and caudal margins of the floor of the neural canal, and is oriented horizontally; the red line joins the cranial and caudal margins of the roof of the neural canal, and is close to horizontal but inclined upwards. C. In “similarity in articulation” orientation (method 4 of this paper). Two copies of the same vertebra, held in the same orientation, are articulated optimally, then the group is rotated until the two are level. The green line connects the uppermost point of the prezygapophyseal rami of the two copies, and is horizontal; but a horizontal line could join the two copies of any point. It happens that for this vertebra methods 3 and 4 (parts B and C of this illustration) give very similar results, but this is accidental.
The preprint has all the illustrations and their captions at the back of the PDF. If you prefer to have them inline in the text, where they’re referenced — and who wouldn’t? — you can download a better version of the manuscript from the GitHub archive.
By the way, you may have noticed that what started our written in Markdown has mutated into an MS-Word document. Why? Well, because journals won’t accept submissions in Markdown. It eas a tedious and error-prone job to convert the Markdown into MS-Word, and not one I am keen to repeat. For this reason, I think I am unlikely to use Markdown again for papers.
References
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2019. What do we mean by the directions “cranial” and “caudal” on a vertebra? PeerJ PrePrints 7:e27437v2. doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.27437v2
Hey! Do you like what we’re doing?
If you do, you might like to think about becoming a patron, making a small monthly donation to SV-POW!. We will use your money to fund research trips; if you donate $5 per month (or more), we will formally acknowledge you in papers that result from research trips that you helped to fund.
The Atterholt & Wedel and plain-old-Wedel talks from SVPCA 2019 are now PeerJ Preprints
September 25, 2019
I’ll have more to say about both of these in the near future, but for now suffice it to say that this (link):
and this (link):
are available for your perusal. Not just the abstracts, but the slide decks as well, just as Mike did for his talk on Jensen’s Big Three sauropods (link).
Jessie is also posting her talk a few slides at a time on her Instagram, with some helpful unpacking, so that’s worth a look even if you have the slides already. That stream of posts starts here.
…including the Atterholt and Wedel (2018) talk on paramedullary diverticula in birds
September 4, 2019
As Mike noted in the last post, many (all?) of the talks from SVPCA 2018 are up on YouTube. Apparently this has been the case for a long time, maybe most of the past year, and I just didn’t know. But I’m glad I do now, because I can encourage you to take 14 minutes and watch Jessie Atterholt’s talk on air spaces inside the neural canal in birds and other archosaurs:
This will not only be interesting in itself — assuming you are interested in pneumaticity, animals, or just how weird the natural world can be at times — but it will be good homework for the Atterholt and Wedel talk at this year’s SVPCA. That talk, also to be delivered by Jessie, will be on a different weird thing about archosaur neural canals, and one that neither of us have yapped about yet on social media.
Here’s the full rundown of talks by SV-POW!sketeers and affiliates at this year’s SVPCA:
Thursday, September 12
- 11:00-11:20 – Vicki Wedel, “Validating the use of Dental Cementum Increment Analysis to determine season-at-death in humans and other mammals”
- 11:20-11:40 – Matt Wedel, “How to make new discoveries in (human) anatomy”
Friday, September 13
- 10:10-10:30 – Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel, “The past, present and future of Jensen’s Big Three sauropods”
- 15:00-15:20 – Jessie Atterholt and Matt Wedel, “Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of post-cranial neurology in dinosaurs”
Presumably most or all of these will become PeerJ Preprints in time, just like Mike’s and my presentations from SVPCA 2017 (link, link) and Jessie’s presentation last year (link). I haven’t heard anything yet about livestreaming or recording of the talks this year — fingers firmly crossed.
Anyway, we look forward to seeing at least some of you at SVPCA or at other points on our trip to England, and to having more stuff to talk about here in the near future. Stay tuned!
On the philosophy of what research is for
August 8, 2019
I’m a bit shocked to find it’s now more than five years since Robert Harington’s Scholarly Kitchen post Open Access: Fundamentals to Fundamentalists. I wrote a response in the comments, meaning to also post it here, but got distracted, and then half a decade passed. Here it is, finally. The indented parts are quotes from Harington.
I must admit to being rather tired of the fundamentalism that pervades discussions around open access policies and business models. On the one hand there are the advocates, and through the laws of conservation of energy, the equal and opposite reaction of anti-open access advocacy. There seems little room for rational debate about open access in the midst of such an antagonistic atmosphere.
It’s always a powerful rhetorical move to call your opponent a fundamentalist. It’s also a lazy one. It absolves you from the tedious responsibility of bothering to understand what the opponent actually wants: just dismiss him has a fundamentalist and call it done. I’d hope we’re better than that. At best, this seems like a fine demonstration of the principle that “there seems little room for rational debate about open access in the midst of such an antagonistic atmosphere”.
You want a rational debate? You want to talk about fundamentals? Fine, let’s do that. Here is the most fundamental question of all: what is research for? Our answer to this will profoundly affect every stance we adopt regarding publishing, OA, researcher evalution and more.
The greatest problem we have in discussing these issues is when person A assumes right off the bat that person B has the same answer to that fundamental question, and is then surprised to find that B disagrees over numerous implementation details. All those details flow from the fundamental mismatch. A and B are literally trying to solve two different problems — no wonder they can’t agree on the solution!
So what is research for? Here are three possible answers.
A. Some people believe (or maybe I should say assume) that research is for the world — for the betterment of the lot of society as a whole, the eradication of illness, the understanding of the environment, and generally the benefit of humanity. As pleasant side-effects, it also feeds publishing businesses and advances researchers’ careers.
B. Some people believe (or assume) that research is primarily for the benefit of the economy: that the principle purpose of the whole process is the financial benefit that accrues to publishers and related professions. As pleasant side-effects, it also advances the world’s knowledge and advances researchers’ careers.
C. Some people believe (or assume, or at least give the impression of assuming) that research is mostly about the careers of researchers — about giving them a way to prove their merit and advance up the career ladder. As pleasant side-effects, it also advances the world’s knowledge and feeds publishing businesses.
All of these fundamental positions exist. (There may be others that I missed.) We could probably all classify various individuals into these groups (but I’ll resist the temptation to throw in examples, as that would surely result in an epic sidetrack).
Notice that one can’t reach one of these three positions by any amount of thought about what happens within the research/publication ecosystem. It’s more fundamental than that. That decision has to come from somewhere outside. For example, my own position is no secret: I am an “A”, and the reason is because I feel it follows from the Golden Rule (“Do to others as you would have them do to you”, Luke 6:31) — probably the most universally agreed ethical principle in any religion (and among those who profess none).
And so when Robert Harrington asks:
The real debate here is to understand more about the motivations and needs of a researcher, who may or may not be funded directly. What is the best business model that will allow a researcher to publish work effectively and allow readers access to that work?
That is really two ——quite separate questions that may have completely different answers: 1, what business model will allow a researcher to publish work effectively?; and 2, what business model will allow readers access to that work? If you are an “A”, you’ll care most about the second question; if you’re a “C” you’ll care about the first question; and if you’re a “B” you might still be thinking about the business model mentioned at the start of the question.
It’s fruitless to expect “A”s, “B”c and “C”s to agree on an answer to a question when each group is hearing a different question.
Here’s another example:
The real story here is that the rights and desires of academics are being represented by organizations that do not reflect their needs, and that perhaps do not even understanding them. There is a form of fundamentalism that dictates to academics that this is what you need; just let us lead the way and we will make things right for you.
This statement suggests a “C” mindset: that the rights and desires of researchers are paramount. But if the organisations in question are “A”s (as for example you’d expect the Alliance for Taxpayer Access or RCUK to be), then this complaint is a non-issue. Of course they don’t reflect researchers’ desires — that’s not what they’re there for. They reflect the needs of broader society (which are often aligned with those of researchers, but by no means always).
That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.
And similarly:
I would suggest that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with a subscription model.
This may be true for “B”s (who might prefer the subscription model because they think it yields the most revenue) and for “C”s (who might want to place their work in a specific paywalled journal that is well regarded in their field). But it’s much less likely for “A”s, who see great public benefit in free access, and conversely great harm in arbitrary barriers.
So there you go. Fundamentals.
I’ve been on vacation for a couple of weeks, hence the radio silence here at SV-POW! after the flood of Supersaurus posts and Matt’s new paper on aberrant nerves in human legs.
But the world has not stood still in my absence (how rude of it!) and one of the more significant things to have happened in this time is the announcement of RVHost, a hosted end-to-end scholarly publishing solution provided by River Valley Technologies.
It’s not so long ago that scholarly publishing remained technically difficult, and could only be achieved by using expensive proprietary technologies. Journals that rolled their own tended to make rather creaky systems that were not much fun to use — and come to that, the commercial systems were mostly pretty wretched, too. But now there are a lot more options. I’ve surely missed some, but among the low-cost, open-oriented hosted publishing solutions out there are:
- Open Journal Systems, the daddy of them all, dating back to 2001. As well as offering a hosted solution, the publishing software itself is free to download and use.
- Ubiquity Press, a content-neutral publisher that can be used to run any journal, and which is at the heart of the Open Library of Humanities‘ own journal.
- Scholastica, a very low-cost solution which is used to host (among many others) Discrete Analysis and Advances in Combinatorics.
- Now, RVHost.
These platforms (and others that I have no doubt missed — do remind me, in the comments) provide a range of service levels and price points so that every journal should be able to find a service that suits it. Editorial boards wanting to move away from exploitative publishers have all sorts of options these days, and it’s ever easier to go open access.
