Fwd: Re: Parallel Paper Submission

[James M. Bower]

>
>
>The opinions of experts should weigh a lot more than those of others ---
>that's the only way to maintain quality and quality is absolutely critical
>to scientific work.

The deep and serious problem, in my view, is that the review of 
papers has become more and more political and more and more 
conservative, as viewed over my now 20 years publishing in the 
scientific literature.  All one has to do is look at the real process 
of publishing in journals like Science and Nature to see that.  Even 
established investigators regularly complain about a review process 
that seems to be driven more by who you know than what you know and 
that regularly rejects papers based on what is in the discussion 
section, rather than what is in the methods and results.

Personally, I increasingly find that graduate students and postdocs 
are better judges of what is scientifically interesting than are many 
established faculty tied up in these political loops.  I realize 
there is an inherent contradiction here, because at least in biology, 
many of the senior faculty I know (including one I am very familiar 
with) rely heavily on their graduate students and post docs to ghost 
reviews.  So perhaps the problem has to do with the fact that the 
ghost reviewing students are trying to write the kind of reviews they 
would imagine their mentors would write. :-)

Whatever, in my view there is no question that something is broken, 
and something needs to be done to fix it.  The robustness of the 
discussions on this mail group speaks to that.  I also think that, in 
the long run, the review that matters is the one that will be 
provided by the graduate student 100 years from now who no longer 
understands the politics and will therefore be considering published 
work on its merits and with the benefit of some hindsight.  I would 
prefer to be able to speak to that student without the political 
filter currently being applied to way too many of our papers.  I am 
happy to take the risk that I will be judged a fool.  Rather that 
than not be allowed to take risks at all.

Jim Bower


-- 
            ***************************************
                        James M. Bower Ph.D.

                      Research Imaging Center
       University of Texas Health Science Center - San Antonio

                            and

                Cajal Neuroscience Research Center
                 University of Texas - San Antonio


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