Import: Scientific research publications are one of the most important tools that a researcher can use to promote and disseminate his work, to receive constructive criticism and to recognize his efforts. And with the term "his work" we refer to all that of innovations, inventions and discoveries that stem from scientific research and aspire to be the basis of progress and culture.
And yet, as long as we can not deny that the research activity has received impressive growth in the last 100 years with the similar impact on everyday life in all areas, we can not deny that the framework for scientific publications with that which existed only shortly after the middle of the last century. What changed in the meantime?
The biggest and most important changes in the process of publishing scientific papers concern their management by publishing houses. Today, as documented, the majority of the world literature is controlled (as authors sign a transfer of rights to publish their work) by just six major publishers (ACS, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Springer, Elsevier, Wiley) . Access to the work is allowed by the publishing house to members who pay an annual subscription and to non-members with a lump sum payment.
The result of this policy is the loss of free access to scientific research, while at the same time high profits for such firms as they publish a huge volume of literature without incurring costs / percentages of writers and evaluators. It should be noted that the largest proportion of this scientific research has been funded and continues to be funded by governmental and non-governmental organizations to promote know-how, research methodology and therapies in medicine.
Thus, the goals of research funding agencies are in direct conflict with the policies of publishing houses. The awareness of these contradictions has led members of the scientific community to establish new publishing houses, such as frontiersin.org , plos.org , etc., which develop an open access approach in which authors or research funding agencies pay a one-time fee so that their work is permanently freely accessible by the entire scientific community. Although the open access movement is increasingly gaining ground in the scientific community, the vast majority of the literature remains in the hands of the six.
Vassilis Kokkinos
Electrical Engineer, MSc, PhD
Almost all scientific publications are controlled by only six companies
( Republished with translation from : YourNewsWire , “ Nearly All Scientific Papers Controlled By Same Six Corporations ”, Posted on July 20, 2015, by Sean Adl-Tabatabai in Sci/Environment )
Only six companies control the flow of scientific information, as revealed in a new study in Canada. As all scientific journals, from the 1970 decade and beyond, are controlled by these same few companies.
The researchers examined scientific literature published between 1973 and 2013 and found that ACS , Reed Elsevier , Sage , Taylor & Francis , Springer and Wiley-Blackwell control almost all of the publications, each of them.
βλ. PLOS, Research Article, "The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era"(The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Age), Vincent Lariviere, Stefanie Haustein, Philippe Mongeon, Published: June 10, 2015, DOI: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0127502
Summary: The integration of the scientific publishing industry has been the subject of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to the high profit margins of major publishers. However, the share of scientific production published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time in various industries, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such an analysis, based on 45 million articles posted on the Web of Science during the period 1973-2013. This shows that in both the natural and medical sciences (NMS) and the social sciences and humanities (SSH), the publishers / companies Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis have increased their share in published production, especially after the advent of the digital age (mid-1990s). Taken together, the top five publishers account for more than 50% of all work published in 2013. The social science sector has the highest concentration (70% of articles from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% of the top five publishers). NMS industries are somewhere in between these percentages, mainly due to the strength of their scientific communities, such as the ACS (American Chemical Society). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chemical_Society ) in chemistry or APS (American Physical Society http://www.aps.org/publications/ ) in physics. This research also examines the migration of magazines between small and large publishers and explores the effect of publisher change on referrals, ie on the influence factor[*]. It ends with a discussion about the financial elements that exist in the educational edition…. (the continuation in the survey summary in English)
[*] The impact factor ( IF) of an academic journal is a measure that reflects the average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. It is often used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal in its field, with journals with higher impact factor scores being considered more important than those with lower ones. The impact factor was coined by Eugene Garfield , founder of the Institute for Scientific Information . Impact factors have been calculated annually, starting in 1975 for journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports.
Many of the smaller publishers have been absorbed by major publishers / businesses, for example, and academic research teams have become more and more indebted to the interests of these major publishers, who tend to favor major industries such as the medicinal products and vaccines.
Much of the independence that has once been valuable within the scientific community has virtually gone, as these big publishers have taken control of them and now they even dictate what types of content will be published. The result is a publishing oligopoly in which scientists are silenced by a primordial tendency towards politically correct and a "science" that must have the industry's favor to move forward.
“ In general, these large commercial publishing companies control more than half of the market for scientific papers in both the natural and medical sciences and the social sciences and humanities ,” said Professor Vincent Lariviere , lead study author from the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Montreal.
“ In addition, large commercial publishers have huge sales, with profit margins reaching almost 40%. While it is true that publishers have played a vital role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge in the era of print publication, it is now very doubtful whether they are still necessary in today’s digital age .”
The following infographic from Natural News illustrates the alarming prevalence of this oligarchy in academic publishing:
see Academic oligarchy: Majority of science publishing is controlled by just six companies
Six major publishing companies control the fields of chemistry, psychology and social sciences
The fields that are the most controlled by this academic oligarchy include those dealing with chemistry, psychology, social sciences, and professional fields. On the other hand, biomedical research, physics, the arts and the humanities are affected to a lesser extent by these six corporate publishers, according to the study.
This means that, over time, some sciences have become more corrupt than others since they have already been absorbed by embracing corporate publications. Such content, though often not high, is extremely profitable for publishers who not only have to pay for the articles they publish but also resell this content digitally with a profit margin above 40%.
“ As long as publication in high-impact journals is a requirement for researchers to gain academic and other credentials, to obtain research funding, and to be recognized by their peers, large commercial publishers will maintain their dominance in the academic publishing system ,” Lariviere adds.
Publishing / Publishing through one of the "Big Six" corporate magazines does not add value, the study notes
Does the publication in prestigious journals really make a big difference in the article's exposure to the scientific community and the amount of references to it? Not really, researchers find. Their range is about the same, they found, in addition to the fact that small publishers are less likely to actively promote a special agenda of interest and are therefore less likely to censor science that does not correspond to their official line.
“ One would expect that the acquisition of a journal by a major publisher would result in an increase in the journal’s visibility ,” Lariviere said. “ However, our study shows that there is no clear increase in terms of citations after switching from a small to a large publisher .”
“ Our findings question the real added value of large publishers. Ultimately, the question is whether the services provided to the scientific community by these publishers can justify the increase in the share of funding from universities, which has essentially passed into their own hands .”
A study reveals the downward effect of the high influence of magazines
( Republished with translation from : UdeMNouvelles , “ Study reveals declining influence of high impact factor journals Wednesday “, 07 November 2012 12:02 News, Accueil> English > News)
The world's most prestigious journals, such as Cell, Nature, Sience and the American Medical Association (JAMA), have less and less influence among scientists, according to a research co-author is Vincent Lariviere, a professor at the University of Montreal at the School of Librarianship and Scientific Information Systems. The research questions the relationship between the influence of magazines and the number of references / referrals post-post from other papers / publications.
“ In 1990, 45% of the top 5% of most cited articles were published in the top 5% of journals with the highest impact factor. In 2009, that figure was just 36% ,” Lariviere said. “ That means the most cited articles are published almost exclusively in journals with a high impact factor .” The proportion of these articles published in major scientific journals has declined sharply over the past two decades. The study was based on a sample of more than 820 million citations and 25 million articles published between 1902 and 2009. The findings were published [ pdf file 14 pages in English ] in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).
For each year analyzed in the study, Lariviere assessed the strength of the relationship between citations to an article in the two years following publication and the journal’s impact factor. He then compared this to the percentage of the most cited articles published in journals with the highest impact factor scores. “ Using a variety of measures, the goal was to see whether the ‘smart’ power of the impact factor score on the citations that articles received has changed over time ,” Lariviere said. “ From 1902 to 1990, big findings were reported for the top journals ,” Lariviere notes. But that relationship is less true today.
Lariviere and his colleagues George Lozano and Yves Gingras from the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies at UQAM also found that the decline in the high impact factor of journals began in the early 90s, when the Internet experienced rapid growth within the scientific community. “ Digital technology has changed the way researchers are informed about scientific texts. History tells us that we have all subscribed, at one time or another, to printed journals. Journals were the main source for articles and we could not avoid the big journals ,” Lariviere notes. “ But since the advent of Google Scholar , for example, the process of finding information has completely changed. Search engines provide access to all articles, even if they have not been published in reputable scientific journals .”
The influence factor as a measure of the influence of a magazine was developed in the 1960 decade by Eugene Garfield, one of the founders of the book. "This is essentially the average number of times that a magazine's articles refer to a two-year period"Explains Lariviere.
"Initially, this index was used to help libraries decide which magazines to subscribe. But over time, it has also been used to evaluate researchers and determine the value of their editions". The importance of the influence factor is so deeply rooted in the collective consciousness of the academic community that researchers themselves use the influence factor to decide which journals their articles will submit for publication.
Several experts in bibliometrics have criticized the use of the impact factor as a measure of an academic journal’s visibility. A common criticism is that the index contains a fundamental calculation error. “ It counts citations from all types of articles published by a journal ,” says Lariviere, “ but it only divides them by the number of articles and research reports (and not by the number of all articles). Thus, the impact factor is overestimated for journals that publish a large proportion of editorials, letters to the editor, and scientific news rather than scientific papers, as do the journals Science and Nature .”
Another criticism is that the time frame over which citations are counted when calculating the impact factor is too short. “ There are research areas in which the dissemination of knowledge is faster than in some others ,” Lariviere said. “ We cannot, for example, expect the engineering field to have the same kind of impact factor as the biomedical sciences .” However, the impact factor of journals is calculated for a fixed period, up to two years after the publication of the articles, regardless of the field or discipline in which they are cited.
The results of the survey reveal some interesting points. On the one hand, magazines have increasingly poor predictions in the numbers of references to an article they can expect to receive. "Not only the predictive capacity of the influence factor has been reduced, but also the influence factor is no longer suitable for the evaluation of the research"Said Lariviere. In his opinion, if we want to evaluate the researchers and their work, it is best to use references, which are a real measure of the effect of an article. "This indicator is more accurate. This is not an assessment based on the magazine hierarchy". On the other hand, research confirms that the dynamics of scientific journals are changing, in particular due to the free access to knowledge made possible and carried out by the Internet.
"So what is the current function of scientific journals?" Lariviere asks. "There is only one of them: peer review,[**]".
[**] Peer review : Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competence over work producers (peers). It is a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession or discipline within a given field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. Academic peer review is often used to determine the suitability of an academic paper for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and the field or profession in which the activity is performed, e.g., medical peer review.
Note:
The University of Montreal is officially known as the Université de Montréal.
For more information:
William Raillant-Clark
International Press Attaché
University of Montreal
Tel: 514-343-7593
w.raillant-clark@umontreal.ca
@uMontreal_News
References / Related:
- Companies block access to everything from miraculous drugs to scientific research
- 10 Open Source Policies for a Commonwealth Society
- Will technology disappear from universities?
- Creative Commons, The Commonwealth
- Copying Culture in the US and Germany (The Copy Culture in the US and Germany)
- The Struggle to Take Back Our Genes
- The Supreme Court rules out the genomic DNA
- PLOS, Publishing, Periodically, Innovation, Open Access, Newsroom, Community,
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Open Access Journals Search Engine (OAJSE)
