Shorter Content Means Death for Scientific Articles
December 26, 2016
The digital age is a culture that subsists on digesting quick bits of information before moving onto the next. Scientific journals are hardly the herald of popular trends, but in order to maintain relevancy with audiences the journals are pushing for shorter articles. The shorter articles, however, presents a problem for the authors says Ars Technica in the, “Scientific Publishers Are Killing Research Papers.”
Shorter articles are also pushed because scientific journals have limited pages to print. The journals are also pressured to include results and conclusions over methods to keep the articles short. The methods, in fact, are usually published in another publication labeled supplementary information:
Supplementary information doesn’t come in the print version of journals, so good luck understanding a paper if you like reading the hard copy. Neither is it attached to the paper if you download it for reading later—supplementary information is typically a separate download, sometimes much larger than the paper itself, and often paywalled. So if you want to download a study’s methods, you have to be on a campus with access to the journal, use your institutional proxy, or jump through whatever hoops are required.
The lack of methodical information can hurt researchers who rely on the extra facts to see if it is relevant to their own work. The shortened articles also reference the supplementary materials and without them it can be hard to understand the published results. The shorter scientific articles may be better for general interest, but if they lack significant information than how can general audiences understand them?
In short, the supplementary material should be included online and should be easily accessed.
Whitney Grace, December 26, 2016
Monopoly On Scientific Papers
August 31, 2015
If you work in the academic community this headline from Your News Wire shouldn’t come as a surprise: “Nearly All Scientific Papers Controlled By Same Six Corporations.” A group of researchers studied scientific papers published between 1973-2013 and discovered that six major publishers ruled the industry: Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Reed Elsevier, and ACS. During the specified time period, it was found that the larger ones absorbed smaller publishers. Another, more startling, fact came to light as well: academic research groups must rely more and more on the main six publishers’ interests if they want to get their research published.
“Much of the independence that was once cherished within the scientific community, in other words, has gone by the wayside as these major publishers have taken control and now dictate what types of content get published. The result is a publishing oligopoly in which scientists are muzzled by and overarching trend toward politically correct, and industry-favoring, ‘science.’”
The six publishers publish subjects that benefit their profit margin and as a direct result they influence major scientific fields. Fields concerning chemistry, social sciences, and psychology are the most influenced by the publishers. This leads to corruption in the above disciplines and researchers are limited by studies that will deliver the most profits to the publishers. The main six publishers can also publish the papers digitally for a 40% profit margin.
There is good news. The study did find that publishing a paper via a smaller venue does not affect its reach. It also has the added benefit of the smaller venue not pushing a special interest agenda. The real question is are big publishers even needed in a digital age anymore?
Whitney Grace, August 31, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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