Edit: just to be clear: I didn't at the time read that as "submission tax". More of, trying to be helpful and using things they personally were familiar with. Most, if not all, of the extra references would make our paper better... If we weren't fighting that damned page limit, that is.
I wrote about that a while ago here: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
That's a problem that would fix itself the moment most useful research was mainly available on such platforms.
> more importantly, funders don't recognise the work you've done there
Once again, that sounds like mostly a problem that would disappear if a large migration to open platforms was to happen.
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So it seems the main poroblem seems to be that there's no incentive to be among the first to make the move? IIRC it's often the journals that don't want content to be published elsewhere, so I guess just doing both is also not that simple.
What you propose would mean twitter or facebook will replace those journals, people with huge twitter followings, or "celebrity" scientists would dominate science, the works of people without such marketing skills would get drowned out.
(This is sort of true for current system too, but I think situation would be much worse in new system.)
Peer review is often effective, but it can't reliably block fraudulent publications like those described in the posted article. Most bad papers are rejected, but the authors can always try again at another journal. Any paper will probably get published somewhere, eventually, even if only in a Hindawi or MDPI journal. The journals aren't accountable to anyone, and as long as they have enough good articles to serve as cover, academics will need to pay for access because citing relevant prior work is obligatory. The publishing system is very weak against fraud.
Isn't that at its core the same as with scientific journals? People trust these journals to curate science in the same way you suggest twitter would come to curate science if it made the move online.
1. It's already possible to call attention to a paper through twitter, regardless of whether it's published in a journal or not. Paywalls gate-keep the content somewhat and makes sharing easier, but that's a minor side effect of a very broken system.
2. Papers (and involved data) being available on public platforms like github that already have mechanisms for reporting and tracking issues as well as built-in review tools, in githubs case even a separate discussion feature now, would allow for much quicker discussion critizising bad methodology.
3. Working with a VCS like git would automatically make it clear who wrote, edited or removed what.
Even if funders gave large sums of money dedicated to data publication, if recurring billing is involved it will eventually break as attention wanes. Data archives need to be managed by an institution or purchased with a single up-front fee, otherwise they won't stick around.
There's also the aspect that, even if you as an individual take it upon yourself to publish your data without institutional support, anyone who reads your paper will most likely ignore your dataset. Which is somewhat demotivating.
https://docs.github.com/en/github/managing-large-files/condi...
So, yes, that's fundamentally "a matter of funding". It can be fixed by academics and bureaucrats agreeing to switch to some other system. On international level. I think if you got the top 20 countries to coordinate, the rest would follow suit. Any bets on when that will happen? ;)
Here is an example that even the highest profile journal can lack ethics: circa 2005, Nature published a paper comparing a selection of scientific articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The editorial board of Nature selected the articles and sent them to reviewers. They only publishes metrics and a few quotes of their data (the list of selected articles and the reviews). The results were surprising and made a lot of buzz. But Britannica noted that one of these quotes was a sentence that was not it their encyclopedia. Nature had to admit that they selected some Wikipedia articles, and when they could not find the equivalent Britannica article, they sometimes built it by mixing articles and adding a few sentences of their own. Obviously, the process were totally biased, from the selection to the publication.
The version that is more difficult to detect is when a cabal of colleagues agree to push each others' papers in this way. So editor A says "you should really quote authors B, C and D." And somewhere else, editor B is saying "you should really quote authors A, C and D."
Machine learning might be a way to tackle this at scale, by teasing out these associations. Of course, this relies on a degree of transparency. Some journals publish all editors' comments and all revisions of a paper. This is a Good Thing, but humans aren't reading all published research, let alone all the meta data.
If someone with relevant ML skills wants to address this, and fancies starting a project, do get in touch :)
A note on the Chinese insinuations that have been mentioned: As always, it's a bit more complex. There may well be reasons that some states might sponsor or 'encourage' gaming of intellectual institutions. If the world is viewed as a zero-sum game, and the currency is power, this unfortunately seems inevitable. Science tends away from this and towards collaboration, but 'politics' often seems to tend toward competition. I've seen university heads explicitly declare to all staff how they intend to game the national rankings, and nobody bats an eyelid, it's business as usual. It's daft and harmful, and frankly I think it requires hard effort from idealistic grassroots activists to address it. Societal improvements are often won through struggle, they're not given away, they don't happen by incremental evolution.
More worrying, what does it mean for science if we can't distinguish between a self-serving cabal and genuine good intentions?
I know about the politics too, that's the main reason why I never went to pursue an academic career, but being honest I never witnessed such plain fraud in my UNI. It was more of a friends-get-all scheme.
I'm sorry the story ended badly :) and yes - I've lowered the bar, sadly.
I got accepted in a Chinese-oriented journal (i.e. most of the Editorial Board were Chinese) - I am not just 'saying' this, I'm saying because the OP mentioned "it's a Chinese thing" over results and datasets, whatever, I digress.
On the last revision round, the Editor told me that I was lacking some references, which he promptly send me. Turned out that 6 out 6 of his 'recommendations' were papers HE WAS ONE OF THE AUTHORS.
Since the paper was not OFFICIALLY accepted, I caved in and cited the guy (3 times), to my UTTER DISMAY.
If you don't play the game, other Chinese are playing the game and having the results.
I don't mean to insult Chinese people, but this is what is happening...