Behind the Curtain Again

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of the not so great behind the scenes goings on in science. I'm revisiting that after news broke yesterday of a paper by Dr Fiona Ingleby and Dr Megan Head being rejected by a journal reviewer with the following comment.

Images of comments from Fiona Ingleby's twitter

The paper in question was on gender issues in the flow of researchers from PhDs to Post Docs and not only does the review suggest that the authors needed 'to find one or two male biologists to work with', it also included this lovely commentary.

Images of comments from Fiona Ingleby's twitter

Or Mr Reviewer, maybe there are issues of where women get published due to people like you. On top of the drivel above the Reviewer also acknowledges looking up the author's websites and notes their genders and post doc status in the review and appears to see them as 'junior' researchers. Ironically both authors  have over 20 years of research under their belts. You know how I said status matters in my original behind the curtain post? Well, I think this is a perfect example of that point. 

On their twitter feeds, Dr Ingleby and Dr Head have pointed out that this kind of review really shows why we need double blind peer review. At the moment, when an author submits a paper they get reviews back from anonymous reviewers. However, the reviewers get full access to the author's details so can easily find out things like their gender and status in the field in question at will. Does this skew their perceptions of the work they are given to read? Well I think the above comments tell you that it does. Double bind peer review would remove the element of reviewer bias as the reviewer can only judge the work, not the person. Another option is to let the authors know who is reviewing them because, as you find with internet trolls, once you take away the mask of anonymity, people think a lot more before they speak. However, a clear argument against this would be that knowing a reviewer's identity could lead to personal vendettas or bribery. Therefore, double blind peer review is probably the way to go to protect integrity in science. 

The publisher (PLOS One for anyone who cares) who allowed these comments to stand as 'legitimate' criticism have since apologised and state that the paper is under being looked at under the appeal Dr Ingleby and Dr Head have submitted. But frankly, that's not good enough. How could any editor allow such complete and utter rubbish be included as a review? What are they going to do to ensure this doesn't happen again? Will they stop sending papers to the reviewer in question? I hope that this incident sparks a wider discussion and maybe change in the peer review process, but I won't hold my breath. If at least it makes reviewers think twice about what they write about papers and what editors accept as legitimate reviews then that's a small positive result from this. However. until peer review changes, I don't think we'll see the back of dodgy reviewers comments.

What is open access and why are people talking about it?

There's an ongoing debate in the scientific community about how scientific research should be disseminated to other scientists and the general public at large. At first glance, I can imagine that this sounds very much like an internal issue, but is that really the case? So much of the work universities do is funded by research councils, who award government funds to projects deemed to be worth investing in. Therefore, the general public as tax payers have a stake in the research performed under such grants. So don't we have a right to have access to the research performed with our money? The answer to that question is a resounding yes.

In many ways traditional publishing is still king in science. Scientists submit work to a journal, it is peer reviewed (a process with certain level of controversy in itself), it is published as an article of some form on paper or on line and a payment is made by or on behalf of an individual to access the work. However, change is coming in the form of Green and Gold Open Access. UK Research councils now have a policy that states that work done using grants from them must be published via either the Green or Gold Open Access pathways. But what does that mean?

A research article that has Gold Open Access is simply a peer-reviewed journal article which is free to view by anyone on the day of release. Therefore, anyone anywhere in the world can read it without having to pay. But how can journals make money from this? The answer is the levying article processing charges from authors, typically of the order of thousands of pounds to publish the article. In the UK these charges are often paid from a central university pot provided by the government. The alternative to this is known as Green Open Access. Under Green Open Access an article is initially published behind a pay wall, but it is it is made freely available after a period of 6-12 months (depending on field and research council). Therefore, under this form of open access only subscribers or those able to pay will have access to the most up to date research. The positive is a university doesn't have to pay article processing charges to go down this route so arguably its a cheaper alternative in the short term. 

Which model is best for the future is debatable; part of the problem is we live in an insincerely large global community with scientists collaborating from all over the world, and not everyone is going open access. So while the UK's universities are starting to pay to publish, they are also still paying to read articles from the rest of the world (and research funded by non governmental organisations) often helping to produce huge profits for giants like Elsevier (see last week's roundup). Is that fair? Its hard to say. Someone has to foot the bill for peer review and editorial costs. But is it worth paying for open access in a journal where vast amounts of content is sealed behind a pay wall by default? This is the very essence of the debate, and its hard to see which is the right way to turn. The Times Higher Education Supplement published an article in 2012 detailing the arguments between Green and Gold, which is well worth a read. 

The other part of the open access landscape is the arXiv (pronounced archive) or pre-print servers. These open pages are where scientists upload their work primarily for comment and discussion with other members of the scientific community in the same field before going for publication. However, this isn't without its own problems. Certain journals won't publish material that's been uploaded to the arXiv and papers submitted are not peer reviewed so they don't have a true 'stamp of approval' against them.

What is the publishing community doing in response to the open access movement? Some publishers are creating new fully open access journals, where all content is free from day one. Some like the new journals from Nature Publishing Group have flat publishing fees, but some publishers are doing something a bit more interesting. The Public Library of Sciences (PLoS) is a not for profit publisher that has a range of journals with a tiered payment system, with one price for first world countries, along with reduced fees and free publishing for those from less well off countries. This is an interesting effort as it's trying to encourage open access to become normal and accessible on a global scale, not just on a country wide scale. 

In time I think open access will become a global standard, as well as a national one, but first the question of who pays and how needs to be fully ironed out into a single policy.