Abstract
Does the Journal Article Have a Future?
Malcolm Macleod1
Importance
From the perspective of the researcher, there seems to be too much research, of often questionable quality, in too many journals, published following too little scrutiny.
Observations
It has become more difficult to distinguish between intrusive email solicitations from “proper” publishers and those from predatory publishers. While many employed in publishing have the most noble of intentions, the profits of publishing houses—profit drawn largely from our research budgets—continue to soar. At the same time, alternative routes of dissemination, such as preprint servers, now allow research findings to be made public, if not published, at minimal cost. Loud protestations from journals that preprints are of inferior quality because they have not been peer reviewed would carry more weight if the process of peer review was a reliable guarantee of quality and the provenance of the data presented. Despite several decades of opportunity to increase the value of journal articles by investing in these processes, most publishers have not done so. Many in my own community have been complicit in the generation of “research for publication” rather than “research for the advancement of knowledge” (where publication is a part of the process, but not the primary objective). Drivers for these behaviors come from across the research ecosystem, and the focus on journal publication as the cardinal researcher output for evaluation serves as the major enabler of exploitative publisher behaviors.
Conclusions
If the journal article is to have a future, this extractive behavior must stop. The added value of peer review needs to be clear and apparent, and the quality of published work must be such that research users can trust the provenance of what is reported; with sufficient information, data, and code provided so that they can check that provenance if they wish. The quality of published work is improving, in some respects, at some journals, and those who have driven these changes, often in the face of internal opposition, should be celebrated. I will close by outlining some further avenues for improvement.
1Edinburgh Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, malcolm.macleod@ed.ac.uk.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures
Malcom Macleod is a member of the Peer Review Congress Advisory Board but was not involved in the review or decision for this abstract.