TRANSCRIPT
“I'm deeply depressed when, in a discussion with a graduate student, I say, "It might be interesting to do so and so," and the first question the student asks is will that make a Cell paper. To me, that's putting the cart before the horse. The first question you should ask is – is that an interesting question? Is it possible to get an answer to it? Would the answer actually take us further to what we want to know? And I would hope that all of those things are uppermost in a graduate student's mind when they are thinking about their experiments. Now, you obviously have to be somewhat political, and you obviously have to think about whether what you're doing is going to lead to the sort of results that will both generate the publications that people need for their careers and be attractive to funding agencies so you can carry on doing the work.”
-Michael Acam, Ph.D.
Head of Department and Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“I've seen that all the time – it's been a big change while I've been alive – from young scientists talking about their work to young scientists talking about papers and whether they've got them in the press, and what the review is, and whether they can get a paper out of this work or not. And if you think like that, you know, you're not putting your energy where you need to, which is worrying about your project and whether there is a better way of doing it, and whether it's worth doing, and could you think of another way, another experiment that would be a better approach to it.”
-Peter Lawrence, Ph.D.
Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“I would like to think that the name of the journal is going to be less important in the future than it was. There have been a lot of movements afoot – there's this, what is it called? - DORA - I can't remember what it's an acronym for, but a lot of really eminent scientists, with Nobel Prizes and all, saying that they felt that this emphasis on the impact factor of the journal was completely wrong and was undermining excellent science and so. And so, I'd like to think that... of course you need to publish your work because how is everybody going to know about it, but the actual journal you publish in should be less important than the quality of the work itself, and hopefully that will get better.”
-Margaret Scott Robinson, Ph.D.
Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, University of Cambridge
“Fundamentally I think it's a problem of funding and evaluation and combination of the two. About in the 1980s they brought in this idea that you can quantitatively measure people's ability. It came into lots of things: tennis players, averages, you name it. I don't think they've done it with art yet, although perhaps they are, by who earns the most money in art. Anything that can be quantitated is now become a measure of something. And that, of itself, produced an audit society in which people are trying to beat various measures. And it became applied to scientists.
You see it increasingly now, every time you open a journal and so on, you'll see a list of the top quoted scientists there, the highest of high fliers, the people that get the most grant money, all these things – anything you can quantitate. And that becomes equated with a real ability. And that idea that you can measure people, measure papers, measure journals, impact factors, quote citations, all these things has been damaging to science. And that is at the heart of the problem, because then the granting bodies spend a lot of time taking notice of these factors because they are apparently objective and they are numerical and so that has produced, in my opinion, a plague that's affected science. It's destroyed originality largely. It's meant that money is given to fewer and fewer people. So fewer and fewer people who don't have a record can try. It's quite insidious how it's happened.”
-Peter Lawrence, Ph.D.
Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“The problem comes when you're sitting on committees and you're trying to judge people where you don't really understand the science, and that happens all the time to somebody like me. I sat on an ERC panel for ecology and evolutionary biology and the panel is assessing grants that go all the way from paleontology to marine microbial ecology. The fraction of the grants that I actually really understand are tiny. So you are trying to find ways of assessing people and applications where you don't have the expert knowledge to really make the judgment that you would really like to make. I don't know what the solution is. But if I'm judging a person, if I'm judging an individual that wants to come to my lab, I will look at what they've done rather than what journal they've published in.”
-Michael Acam, Ph.D.
Head of Department and Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“There's this big problem with publishing – these publishers are big companies making lots of money off of publishing our tax-payer funded science and they're not letting people read it. But there's quite a lot being done with open access movement and new publishing models so that's being addressed thankfully.”
-Chris Jiggins, Ph.D.
Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Cambridge
“Some of the journals are commercial entities and they're simply out to make money, it's the way they work, and so if there's a high profile story that's coming through, clearly it will sell lots of copies and so it's important to get that published. Occasionally that might mean that it isn't reviewed well or they take the reviews they want. I don't know how these things work on the other side but we personally have been affected by high profile studies that are just not true. When you read the paper, I can tell by reading it that it has been badly reviewed, it's been badly performed and it doesn't make sense. Occasionally this really hurts us and causes us problems where we need to go back and prove… it's almost impossible to prove something is not true. I can only say "I can't reproduce this." This doesn't mean it's not true, it just means I can't reproduce it.”
-Brian Hendrich, Ph.D.
Principle Investigator, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge
“I think that one problem with the fancy journals is that they do like to see everything in black and white and I think that's why a lot of stuff maybe does get swept under the carpet. If you include your reservations when you write the paper these journals might not even send it up for review because they'll say it's not scientifically compelling enough and raises more questions than it answers. I would say fine, send it to another good journal.
I think hopefully having less of an emphasis – I don't know if eLife is the answer – but less of an emphasis on whether you've had papers in Cell, Nature or Science and more on what the paper is actually were about and whether this was really something groundbreaking. A question people sometimes ask is whether this person or this paper had not been there when they were, would the field as a whole have suffered from it. I think pieces of work you can say that about are obviously important no matter where they were published; they could have been published in a journal with an impact factor of four but they were still really important and maybe not appreciated when they were submitted the first time how important they would turn out to be.”
-Margaret Scott Robinson, Ph.D.
Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, University of Cambridge
“There are places where if someone gets a journal paper to review that competes with what you're doing you should refuse to review it because it's not fair, but some people don't, and they sit on it or reject it or they steal the ideas because there is so much pressure to produce: "If I don't get these papers out, if I don't get this grant, I'm not going to have a job." And so people feel that pressure and they cut corners they shouldn't cut and we know this goes on.”
-Brian Hendrich, Ph.D.
Principle Investigator, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge