Elizabeth Gibney
www.nature.com
Originally published July 26, 2018
In the midst of growing public concern over artificial intelligence (AI), privacy and the use of data, Brent Hecht has a controversial proposal: the computer-science community should change its peer-review process to ensure that researchers disclose any possible negative societal consequences of their work in papers, or risk rejection.
Hecht, a computer scientist, chairs the Future of Computing Academy (FCA), a group of young leaders in the field that pitched the policy in March. Without such measures, he says, computer scientists will blindly develop products without considering their impacts, and the field risks joining oil and tobacco as industries whose researchers history judges unfavourably.
The FCA is part of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in New York City, the world’s largest scientific-computing society. It, too, is making changes to encourage researchers to consider societal impacts: on 17 July, it published an updated version of its ethics code, last redrafted in 1992. The guidelines call on researchers to be alert to how their work can influence society, take steps to protect privacy and continually reassess technologies whose impact will change over time, such as those based in machine learning.
The rest is here.
Showing posts with label Publishing Industry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Publishing Industry. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Many Academics Are Eager to Publish in Worthless Journals
Gina Kolata
The New York Times
Originally published October 30, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
Yet “every university requires some level of publication,” said Lawrence DiPaolo, vice president of academic affairs at Neumann University in Aston, Pa.
Recently a group of researchers invented a fake academic: Anna O. Szust. The name in Polish means fraudster. Dr. Szust applied to legitimate and predatory journals asking to be an editor. She supplied a résumé in which her publications and degrees were total fabrications, as were the names of the publishers of the books she said she had contributed to.
The legitimate journals rejected her application immediately. But 48 out of 360 questionable journals made her an editor. Four made her editor in chief. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”
The lead author of the Dr. Szust sting operation, Katarzyna Pisanski, a psychologist at the University of Sussex in England, said the question of what motivates people to publish in such journals “is a touchy subject.”
“If you were tricked by spam email you might not want to admit it, and if you did it wittingly to increase your publication counts you might also not want to admit it,” she said in an email.
The consequences of participating can be more than just a résumé freckled with poor-quality papers and meeting abstracts.
Publications become part of the body of scientific literature.
There are indications that some academic institutions are beginning to wise up to the dangers.
Dewayne Fox, an associate professor of fisheries at Delaware State University, sits on a committee at his school that reviews job applicants. One recent applicant, he recalled, listed 50 publications in such journals and is on the editorial boards of some of them.
A few years ago, he said, no one would have noticed. But now he and others on search committees at his university have begun scrutinizing the publications closely to see if the journals are legitimate.
The article is here.
The New York Times
Originally published October 30, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
Yet “every university requires some level of publication,” said Lawrence DiPaolo, vice president of academic affairs at Neumann University in Aston, Pa.
Recently a group of researchers invented a fake academic: Anna O. Szust. The name in Polish means fraudster. Dr. Szust applied to legitimate and predatory journals asking to be an editor. She supplied a résumé in which her publications and degrees were total fabrications, as were the names of the publishers of the books she said she had contributed to.
The legitimate journals rejected her application immediately. But 48 out of 360 questionable journals made her an editor. Four made her editor in chief. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”
The lead author of the Dr. Szust sting operation, Katarzyna Pisanski, a psychologist at the University of Sussex in England, said the question of what motivates people to publish in such journals “is a touchy subject.”
“If you were tricked by spam email you might not want to admit it, and if you did it wittingly to increase your publication counts you might also not want to admit it,” she said in an email.
The consequences of participating can be more than just a résumé freckled with poor-quality papers and meeting abstracts.
Publications become part of the body of scientific literature.
There are indications that some academic institutions are beginning to wise up to the dangers.
Dewayne Fox, an associate professor of fisheries at Delaware State University, sits on a committee at his school that reviews job applicants. One recent applicant, he recalled, listed 50 publications in such journals and is on the editorial boards of some of them.
A few years ago, he said, no one would have noticed. But now he and others on search committees at his university have begun scrutinizing the publications closely to see if the journals are legitimate.
The article is here.
Monday, April 10, 2017
A Scholarly Sting Operation Shines a Light on ‘Predatory’ Journals
Gina Kolata
The New York Times
Originally posted March 22, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
Yet, when Dr. Fraud applied to 360 randomly selected open-access academic journals asking to be an editor, 48 accepted her and four made her editor in chief. She got two offers to start a new journal and be its editor. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”
Little did they know that they had fallen for a sting, plotted and carried out by a group of researchers who wanted to draw attention to and systematically document the seamy side of open-access publishing. While those types of journals began with earnest aspirations to make scientific papers available to everyone, their proliferation has had unintended consequences.
Traditional journals typically are supported by subscribers who pay a fee while authors pay nothing to be published. Nonsubscribers can only read papers if they pay the journal for each one they want to see.
Open-access journals reverse that model. The authors pay and the published papers are free to anyone who cares to read them.
Publishing in an open-access journal can be expensive — the highly regarded Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals charge from $1,495 to $2,900 to publish a paper, with the fee dependent on which of its journals accepts the paper.
Not everyone anticipated what would happen next, or to what extent it would happen.
The article is here.
The New York Times
Originally posted March 22, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
Yet, when Dr. Fraud applied to 360 randomly selected open-access academic journals asking to be an editor, 48 accepted her and four made her editor in chief. She got two offers to start a new journal and be its editor. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”
Little did they know that they had fallen for a sting, plotted and carried out by a group of researchers who wanted to draw attention to and systematically document the seamy side of open-access publishing. While those types of journals began with earnest aspirations to make scientific papers available to everyone, their proliferation has had unintended consequences.
Traditional journals typically are supported by subscribers who pay a fee while authors pay nothing to be published. Nonsubscribers can only read papers if they pay the journal for each one they want to see.
Open-access journals reverse that model. The authors pay and the published papers are free to anyone who cares to read them.
Publishing in an open-access journal can be expensive — the highly regarded Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals charge from $1,495 to $2,900 to publish a paper, with the fee dependent on which of its journals accepts the paper.
Not everyone anticipated what would happen next, or to what extent it would happen.
The article is here.
Friday, February 3, 2017
Beyond Conflicts of Interest: Disclosing Medical Biases
David M. Shaw
JAMA. 2014;312(7):697-698.
doi:10.1001/jama.2014.8035
The editors of medical and scientific journals always ask authors of papers to declare any financial conflicts of interest (COIs) related to their research. There has recently been a shift away from allowing authors to decide what constitutes a financial COI toward asking them to disclose any potential perceived COI; some journal editors even ask authors to disclose any and all financial interests that they have. But there has also been a shift away from this focus on financial COIs toward a wider conception of COI that includes other types of bias. Since 2010, all journals associated with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) have asked authors to complete a unified COI form that requires disclosure of the following:
1. Associations with commercial entities that provided support for the work reported in the submitted
manuscript (the timeframe for disclosure in this section of the form is the life span of the work being reported).
2. Associations with commercial entities that could be viewed as having an interest in the general area of the submitted manuscript (in the three years before submission of the manuscript).
3. Non-financial associations that may be relevant or seen as relevant to the submitted manuscript.
The article is here.
JAMA. 2014;312(7):697-698.
doi:10.1001/jama.2014.8035
The editors of medical and scientific journals always ask authors of papers to declare any financial conflicts of interest (COIs) related to their research. There has recently been a shift away from allowing authors to decide what constitutes a financial COI toward asking them to disclose any potential perceived COI; some journal editors even ask authors to disclose any and all financial interests that they have. But there has also been a shift away from this focus on financial COIs toward a wider conception of COI that includes other types of bias. Since 2010, all journals associated with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) have asked authors to complete a unified COI form that requires disclosure of the following:
1. Associations with commercial entities that provided support for the work reported in the submitted
manuscript (the timeframe for disclosure in this section of the form is the life span of the work being reported).
2. Associations with commercial entities that could be viewed as having an interest in the general area of the submitted manuscript (in the three years before submission of the manuscript).
3. Non-financial associations that may be relevant or seen as relevant to the submitted manuscript.
The article is here.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Opportunistic Biases: Their Origins, Effects and an Integrated Solution
Jamie DeCoster, Erin A. Sparks, Jordan C. Sparks, Glenn G. Sparks, and Cheri W. Sparks
Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning
Researchers commonly explore their data in multiple ways before choosing the analyses they will present in the final versions of their papers. While this improves the chances of finding publishable results, it introduces an “opportunistic bias,” such that the reported effects are stronger or otherwise more supportive of the researcher’s theories than they would be without the exploratory process. Scientists across many disciplines are increasing their concern about how these biases are affecting the quality of research. After discussing why this occurs, we describe the research practices that create opportunistic biases, consider the impact of opportunistic biases on scientific research, and present a multifaceted solution to ameliorate these effects.
The entire article is here.
Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning
Researchers commonly explore their data in multiple ways before choosing the analyses they will present in the final versions of their papers. While this improves the chances of finding publishable results, it introduces an “opportunistic bias,” such that the reported effects are stronger or otherwise more supportive of the researcher’s theories than they would be without the exploratory process. Scientists across many disciplines are increasing their concern about how these biases are affecting the quality of research. After discussing why this occurs, we describe the research practices that create opportunistic biases, consider the impact of opportunistic biases on scientific research, and present a multifaceted solution to ameliorate these effects.
The entire article is here.
Monday, April 27, 2015
Science’s Big Scandal
Even legitimate publishers are faking peer review.
By Charles Seife
Slate.com
Originally published April 1, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
When something at the core of scientific publishing begins to rot, the smell of corruption quickly spreads to all areas of science. This is because the act of publishing a scientific finding is an essential part of the practice of science itself. You want a job? Tenure? A promotion? A juicy grant? You need to have a list of peer-reviewed publications, for publications are the coin of the scientific realm.
This coin has worth because of a long-standing social contract between scientists and publishers. Scientists hand over their work to a publication for free, and even sometimes pay a fee of several hundred to several thousand dollars for the privilege. What’s more, scientists often feel duty-bound to vet their colleagues’ work for little or no compensation when a publication asks them to. In return, the publications promise a thorough review process that establishes that a published article has some degree of scientific merit. Just like modern coinage, most of scholarly publications’ value resides in a stamp of approval from a trustworthy body.
The entire article is here.
By Charles Seife
Slate.com
Originally published April 1, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
When something at the core of scientific publishing begins to rot, the smell of corruption quickly spreads to all areas of science. This is because the act of publishing a scientific finding is an essential part of the practice of science itself. You want a job? Tenure? A promotion? A juicy grant? You need to have a list of peer-reviewed publications, for publications are the coin of the scientific realm.
This coin has worth because of a long-standing social contract between scientists and publishers. Scientists hand over their work to a publication for free, and even sometimes pay a fee of several hundred to several thousand dollars for the privilege. What’s more, scientists often feel duty-bound to vet their colleagues’ work for little or no compensation when a publication asks them to. In return, the publications promise a thorough review process that establishes that a published article has some degree of scientific merit. Just like modern coinage, most of scholarly publications’ value resides in a stamp of approval from a trustworthy body.
The entire article is here.
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
The retraction war
By Jill Neimark
Aeon Magazine
Originally published December 23, 2014
Here is an excerpt:
Retraction was meant to be a corrective for any mistakes or occasional misconduct in science but it has, at times, taken on a superhero persona instead. Like Superman, retraction can be too powerful, wiping out whole careers with a single blow. Yet it is also like Clark Kent, so mild it can be ignored while fraudsters continue publishing and receiving grants. The process is so wrought that just 5 per cent of scientific misconduct ever results in retraction, leaving an abundance of error in play to obfuscate the facts.
Scientists are increasingly aware of the amount of bad science out there – the word ‘reproducibility’ has become a kind of rallying cry for those who would reform science today. How can we ensure that studies are sound and can be reproduced by other scientists in separate labs?
The entire article is here.
Aeon Magazine
Originally published December 23, 2014
Here is an excerpt:
Retraction was meant to be a corrective for any mistakes or occasional misconduct in science but it has, at times, taken on a superhero persona instead. Like Superman, retraction can be too powerful, wiping out whole careers with a single blow. Yet it is also like Clark Kent, so mild it can be ignored while fraudsters continue publishing and receiving grants. The process is so wrought that just 5 per cent of scientific misconduct ever results in retraction, leaving an abundance of error in play to obfuscate the facts.
Scientists are increasingly aware of the amount of bad science out there – the word ‘reproducibility’ has become a kind of rallying cry for those who would reform science today. How can we ensure that studies are sound and can be reproduced by other scientists in separate labs?
The entire article is here.
Monday, October 20, 2014
Anonymous peer-review comments may spark legal battle
By Kelly Servick
Science Insider
Originally posted September 22, 2014
The power of anonymous comments—and the liability of those who make them—is at the heart of a possible legal battle embroiling PubPeer, an online forum launched in October 2012 for anonymous, post publication peer review. A researcher who claims that comments on PubPeer caused him to lose a tenured faculty job offer now intends to press legal charges against the person or people behind these posts—provided he can uncover their identities, his lawyer says.
The issue first came to light in August, when PubPeer’s (anonymous) moderators announced that the site had received a “legal threat.” Today, they revealed that the scientist involved is Fazlul Sarkar, a cancer researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Sarkar, an author on more than 500 papers and principal investigator for more than $1,227,000 in active grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has, like many scientists, had his work scrutinized on PubPeer. More than 50 papers on which he is an author have received at least one comment from PubPeer users, many of whom point out potential inconsistencies in the papers’ figures, such as perceived similarities between images that are supposed to depict different experiments.
The entire article is here.
Science Insider
Originally posted September 22, 2014
The power of anonymous comments—and the liability of those who make them—is at the heart of a possible legal battle embroiling PubPeer, an online forum launched in October 2012 for anonymous, post publication peer review. A researcher who claims that comments on PubPeer caused him to lose a tenured faculty job offer now intends to press legal charges against the person or people behind these posts—provided he can uncover their identities, his lawyer says.
The issue first came to light in August, when PubPeer’s (anonymous) moderators announced that the site had received a “legal threat.” Today, they revealed that the scientist involved is Fazlul Sarkar, a cancer researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Sarkar, an author on more than 500 papers and principal investigator for more than $1,227,000 in active grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has, like many scientists, had his work scrutinized on PubPeer. More than 50 papers on which he is an author have received at least one comment from PubPeer users, many of whom point out potential inconsistencies in the papers’ figures, such as perceived similarities between images that are supposed to depict different experiments.
The entire article is here.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Trouble at the lab
Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not
The Economist
Originally posted October 19, 2013
“I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace.
Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.
The entire article is here.
The Economist
Originally posted October 19, 2013
“I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace.
Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.
The entire article is here.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
By Josh Fischman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally Published January 31, 2012
A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers.
The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall.
"Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000."
She added that her company improves access rather than impeding it, and said that Internet downloads from some journals increased by as much as 40 percent when Elsevier added them to collections it sells to libraries.
Protesters disagree, and say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook.
Those views highlight a split that could spell serious trouble for journal publishers, and for researchers. Price complaints are not new, but some observers say this is the first time that the suppliers of journal content—the scientists—are upset enough to cut the supply line. But, if publishers are correct, those scientists could cut themselves off from valuable research tools.
According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don't want in order to get a few things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available.
The entire story is here.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally Published January 31, 2012
A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers.The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall.
"Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000."
She added that her company improves access rather than impeding it, and said that Internet downloads from some journals increased by as much as 40 percent when Elsevier added them to collections it sells to libraries.
Protesters disagree, and say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook.
Those views highlight a split that could spell serious trouble for journal publishers, and for researchers. Price complaints are not new, but some observers say this is the first time that the suppliers of journal content—the scientists—are upset enough to cut the supply line. But, if publishers are correct, those scientists could cut themselves off from valuable research tools.
The Boycotters' Complaints
The entire story is here.
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