Daniel
Marovitz is CEO of Faculty of 1000. Faculty of 1000 is a publisher for life scientists and clinical
researchers, and comprises of three services; F1000Prime, F1000Research and
F1000Posters. F1000Research is an open science publishing platform for life
scientists that offers immediate publication and transparent peer review.
Before that, he was the CEO and co-founder of Buzzumi, a cloud-based enterprise
software company. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices:
Op-Ed & Insights.
Quick quiz,
which is bigger: the global music industry or scientific publishing? You may be
surprised to learn that the music industry racks up $15 billion each year in
sales, whereas scientific publishing quietly brings in $19 billion. This
"under-the-radar" colossus gets very little attention, yet influences
us all.
In many
ways, published science tracks and influences the course of our species on this
planet. It enables scientists to find out what other researchers are working on
and what discoveries they have made. It helps governments decide where to
invest and helps universities decide whom to hire. Most people don't give it a
second thought but they should. All of us are consumers of science, and perhaps
most crucially, all of us are eventually medical patients dependent on the
discoveries published in medical journals. The way science is disseminated and
the way articles are published is not just a geeky question for librarians — it
impacts our society in profound ways.
The history
of scientific journals dates back to 1665, when French Journal des sçavan and
the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first published
research results. Around the same time, the first peer review process was
recorded at the Royal Society of London. By the 20th century, peer review
became common practice to help allocate scientific funding, and before the
Internet, all scientific journals were published on paper.
Paper costs
money to buy, more money to print, and even more money to transport. It made
sense that journals worked hard to find the "best" studies because
they were constrained to publishing 10 to 20 articles each month. They limited
the number of pages authors could write and severely limited (and sometimes
charged the authors extra for) color and additional images. The process was
long and laborious for everyone involved, and was constrained by the limits and
costs of a necessarily analog world.
You would
naturally assume that the Internet Age would have changed all of that, but
while all journals now publish online, most of the process is still based on a
paper past. This means many perfectly sound articles are rejected, articles
take too long to be published, and most articles are published with
conclusions, but without the data that supports them. Enough data should be
shared by authors to ensure that anyone can replicate their research efforts
and achieve similar results.
Such
processes seriously bias what is published, impacting all aspects of science
and thus society: from new scientific discoveries and the development of new
medicines, to scientists' livelihoods and how public money is spent.
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