Scientific Publishing:
PNAS cắt bỏ đặc quyền đối với (hầu hết) các bài báo.
Sam Kean The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will discontinue an option for submitting papers that often put prestigious scientists in an awkward fix with colleagues and, at its worst, editors admit, allowed some scientists to subvert peer review and shoehorn dubious papers into print.
As a house organ, the journal has always had an idiosyncratic submissions process. National Academy members, as elite scientists, could shepherd their own work through peer review with less vetting than at other publications by "contributing" a paper. They could also "communicate" a paper on behalf of colleagues who had not been elected to the academy's august ranks. In 1995, PNAS began allowing nonmembers to submit directly to the journal without endorsement, but it grandfathered in the two older submission routes.
In practice, "communicating" a colleague's paper meant that a member lined up referees to review it before PNAS ever saw it. This increased the chance of a favorable reception—and looked suspiciously like cronyism to outsiders. Partly because of that perception, PNAS announced last week that it will end the "communicated by" option (known as Track I) as of 1 July 2010. The move will not affect the privileges of academy members to line up reviews before they submit their own papers to PNAS, however.
The editorial board of PNAS had been discussing the move for years. "It was clear we needed to do something," says David Chandler, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an associate editor of PNAS. "We often had members submitting when they were not experts on the topic, or sometimes the referee reports were cherrypicked." The majority of academy members supported the move, he notes. When polled by the board this summer, 80% voted to end the submission route.
Nevertheless, many members had nagging reservations. Even Chandler argued for reforming rather than killing Track I. "I always thought academy members should have a chance to promote work that was not finding its way into established journals because it was so unorthodox."
Other academy members were nostalgic. "My ambivalence was very simple," said Brian Hoffman, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Once upon a time, members went out of their way to assist me, so I feel the obligation to do the same now."
Still, Hoffman admits the new policy will spare him some awkward obligations. Members could communicate just two papers per year, so colleagues scrambled to get his attention. And it was hard to turn them down without insulting them, he says. "If you feel it's the wrong thing to do, it's hard to look your colleague in the eyes and say no."
Robert A. Weinberg, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, agrees: "One felt obliged out of friendship to communicate things." What's more, says Weinberg, too often publication "depended on whom one knew, and who had good connections."
An example of alleged gamesmanship popped up online 28 August in PNAS. Lynn Margulis, the noted biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, communicated a paper by Donald Williamson, a retired marine biologist in the United Kingdom. In it, Williamson promoted his longheld, intriguing—and, say most other biologists, almost certainly misguided—theory about the origins of caterpillars and butterflies. Current biological theory argues that they were always a single species and that each stage evolved via natural selection. Williamson argues instead that two distinct species (one caterpillar-like, one butterfly-like) somehow fused into a hybrid way back when. One species' sperm must have fertilized the other's eggs, transferring genes laterally across species in a non-Mendelian fashion.
Margulis was unavailable for comment, but Williamson says, "Lynn Margulis is prepared to put her name and reputation on the line" to prove that "genome mergers" occur in evolution, a position his paper supports. He also says he knows that Margulis sent his paper to a half-dozen academy reviewers. Williamson says that he thinks they were all positive reviews, but Margulis told Scientific American last week that she canvassed six or seven reviewers to find the two positive reviews necessary to push the paper through.
[FONT=arial, helvetica][SIZE=-1]
[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=arial, helvetica][SIZE=-1] Wrong track. PNAS' Track I produces many highly cited papers, but Editor-in-Chief Randy Schekman concedes that members sometimes abuse it.[/SIZE][/FONT] [FONT=arial, helvetica][SIZE=-1]CREDIT: JOEL SCHEKMAN[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=arial, helvetica][SIZE=-1][Larger version of this image][/SIZE][/FONT]
Randy Schekman, a biologist at Berkeley and the editor-in-chief of PNAS, says, "I've spent a lot of time fielding angry e-mails questioning how this got through." In general, he says, "we from time to time have members who have an agenda and can usher a paper through against very strong opposition." As with all communicated and contributed papers, a member of the editorial board did review and approve Williamson's paper; PNAS is now investigating the publication process, Schekman said.
Such scenes might seem an inevitable result of scientists lining up their own referees. But PNAS will not take the ultimate step of curbing such privileges for members. Schekman said the rejection rate for communicated or contributed papers that reach PNAS is a few percent, whereas the rejection rate for standard submissions is 80%. In 2008, the journal published 4000 papers, of which about 600 were communicated and about 750 contributed.
Schekman defends member contributions by noting that many are among the journal's most highly cited papers. He also says the contribution option keeps academy members active in PNAS. "It's an unusual and interesting feature to distinguish the journal. And if we didn't have this, I worry members wouldn't be quite as helpful as they are."
Bạn nào có thời gian rảnh dịch cho các bạn khác cùng đọc.
PNAS cắt bỏ đặc quyền đối với (hầu hết) các bài báo.
Sam Kean The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will discontinue an option for submitting papers that often put prestigious scientists in an awkward fix with colleagues and, at its worst, editors admit, allowed some scientists to subvert peer review and shoehorn dubious papers into print.
As a house organ, the journal has always had an idiosyncratic submissions process. National Academy members, as elite scientists, could shepherd their own work through peer review with less vetting than at other publications by "contributing" a paper. They could also "communicate" a paper on behalf of colleagues who had not been elected to the academy's august ranks. In 1995, PNAS began allowing nonmembers to submit directly to the journal without endorsement, but it grandfathered in the two older submission routes.
In practice, "communicating" a colleague's paper meant that a member lined up referees to review it before PNAS ever saw it. This increased the chance of a favorable reception—and looked suspiciously like cronyism to outsiders. Partly because of that perception, PNAS announced last week that it will end the "communicated by" option (known as Track I) as of 1 July 2010. The move will not affect the privileges of academy members to line up reviews before they submit their own papers to PNAS, however.
The editorial board of PNAS had been discussing the move for years. "It was clear we needed to do something," says David Chandler, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an associate editor of PNAS. "We often had members submitting when they were not experts on the topic, or sometimes the referee reports were cherrypicked." The majority of academy members supported the move, he notes. When polled by the board this summer, 80% voted to end the submission route.
Nevertheless, many members had nagging reservations. Even Chandler argued for reforming rather than killing Track I. "I always thought academy members should have a chance to promote work that was not finding its way into established journals because it was so unorthodox."
Other academy members were nostalgic. "My ambivalence was very simple," said Brian Hoffman, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Once upon a time, members went out of their way to assist me, so I feel the obligation to do the same now."
Still, Hoffman admits the new policy will spare him some awkward obligations. Members could communicate just two papers per year, so colleagues scrambled to get his attention. And it was hard to turn them down without insulting them, he says. "If you feel it's the wrong thing to do, it's hard to look your colleague in the eyes and say no."
Robert A. Weinberg, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, agrees: "One felt obliged out of friendship to communicate things." What's more, says Weinberg, too often publication "depended on whom one knew, and who had good connections."
An example of alleged gamesmanship popped up online 28 August in PNAS. Lynn Margulis, the noted biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, communicated a paper by Donald Williamson, a retired marine biologist in the United Kingdom. In it, Williamson promoted his longheld, intriguing—and, say most other biologists, almost certainly misguided—theory about the origins of caterpillars and butterflies. Current biological theory argues that they were always a single species and that each stage evolved via natural selection. Williamson argues instead that two distinct species (one caterpillar-like, one butterfly-like) somehow fused into a hybrid way back when. One species' sperm must have fertilized the other's eggs, transferring genes laterally across species in a non-Mendelian fashion.
Margulis was unavailable for comment, but Williamson says, "Lynn Margulis is prepared to put her name and reputation on the line" to prove that "genome mergers" occur in evolution, a position his paper supports. He also says he knows that Margulis sent his paper to a half-dozen academy reviewers. Williamson says that he thinks they were all positive reviews, but Margulis told Scientific American last week that she canvassed six or seven reviewers to find the two positive reviews necessary to push the paper through.
[FONT=arial, helvetica][SIZE=-1]
[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=arial, helvetica][SIZE=-1] Wrong track. PNAS' Track I produces many highly cited papers, but Editor-in-Chief Randy Schekman concedes that members sometimes abuse it.[/SIZE][/FONT] [FONT=arial, helvetica][SIZE=-1]CREDIT: JOEL SCHEKMAN[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=arial, helvetica][SIZE=-1][Larger version of this image][/SIZE][/FONT]
Randy Schekman, a biologist at Berkeley and the editor-in-chief of PNAS, says, "I've spent a lot of time fielding angry e-mails questioning how this got through." In general, he says, "we from time to time have members who have an agenda and can usher a paper through against very strong opposition." As with all communicated and contributed papers, a member of the editorial board did review and approve Williamson's paper; PNAS is now investigating the publication process, Schekman said.
Such scenes might seem an inevitable result of scientists lining up their own referees. But PNAS will not take the ultimate step of curbing such privileges for members. Schekman said the rejection rate for communicated or contributed papers that reach PNAS is a few percent, whereas the rejection rate for standard submissions is 80%. In 2008, the journal published 4000 papers, of which about 600 were communicated and about 750 contributed.
Schekman defends member contributions by noting that many are among the journal's most highly cited papers. He also says the contribution option keeps academy members active in PNAS. "It's an unusual and interesting feature to distinguish the journal. And if we didn't have this, I worry members wouldn't be quite as helpful as they are."
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