wither peer-reviewed publishing?

Publishing in peer-reviewed journals is a cornerstone of the dissemination of good science. Personally, I find it a little irritating when some especially relevant paper on avian science comes out not in one of the major ornithological journals, but some more general (occasionally, more focused) biological journal.  Not that I don't want advances in my field read by a broader audience, it's just hard enough to keep up with all the literature in my "regular" publications.  There are a number of elements authors consider when choosing which journal to submit to, and not the least is the Impact Factor.

Impact Factors for journals are calculated based on a ratio of the number of citations of recent papers to total number of recent papers published. A letter (1) in the April issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution reveals that some journal editors are requesting that authors of about-to-be-accepted papers include recent citations from their own journals in the manuscripts.  This unsavory behavior results in higher Impact Factors for the editor's journals. The upshot might just be a "mine is bigger than yours" situation if not for the fact that publishing in journals with high Impact Factors (those with papers that are frequently cited) often earns brownie points in academic hiring and promotions.  This practice is controversial enough without the Impact Factors themselves being suspect.

In another wrinkle, The Scientist reports on an author that felt an editor unfairly rejected his paper, and went ahead and bought two pages in the journal (as an advertisement) and got it published that way.  The original dispute centered around possible bias due to editor/publisher corporate connections; that and the novel "solution" employed by the author are both rather unsettling.  Read more here.

Meanwhile, electronic publishing and open access certainly have and will continue to have a profound impact on scientific publishing.  I hope to write more about these topics one of these fine days.

(1) Agrawal, A. A.  2005.  Corruption in journal Impact Factors. Trends Ecol. Evol. 20:157.

Comments

[Mark O'Brien]

Interesting. The other aspect of this is whether an author has published in a "premier" journal or not. It doesn't matter whether the paper is being seen by one's peers in a given discipline, but whether or not some nitwit thinks it is a prestigous journal. The upshot of this is that one could have 30 excellent pieces of work in a regional entomological journal relegated as unimportant because the papers were not in Science or the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. Rather than look at content and scholarly effort, administrators are looking at where something is published and whether or not grant overhead was able to provide plush carpeting for the Dean's offices. Cynical? maybe...