PLOS Blogger Calls Out PLOS ONE Journal

This is an interesting story - a PLOS blogger offers a powerful critique of a high profile PLOS ONE article that is little more than junk science. John Grohol of Psych Central offers a nice overview of the situation, including some good observations around peer review standards and the editorial process.

Links:

• Here is the original article from PLOS ONE: Soothing the Threatened Brain: Leveraging Contact Comfort with Emotionally Focused Therapy.
• Here is Coyne's critique: Soothing psychotherapists’ brains with NeuroBalm.
• Here is another critique of the PLOS ONE article, this time from Neurocritic: I Wanna Hold Your Hand (after 23 sessions of Emotionally Focused Therapy).

It's good to see that Coyne is not so afraid of criticizing his publisher's mistakes that he kept quiet.

PLOS Blogger Calls Out PLOS ONE Journal — Huh?

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
July 15, 2014



We’re living in strange times.

You don’t have to look any further than this lengthy critique of a recent journal article.

The critique appears on a Public Library of Science (PLOS) blog called Mind the Brain penned by James Coyne, PhD. Coyne is a well-published and diverse researcher himself, so he knows bad research when he sees — or smells — it.

The journal article being critiqued?



Something that was published by PLOS itself in its premiere open-access journal, PLOS ONE.

I guess the disconnect for me is that there is literally thousands of words of critique expended here on this journal article. And not just by Coyne, but also by the anonymous Neurocritic. Coyne expends over 3,000 words in this blog entry alone, and another 1,500 words critiquing the press release alone on this study on his own blog. Coyne is both brilliant and extensive in his critique; his review is worth the read.

The article under critique is only 5,500 some odd words. So nearly as much writing has been put into bashing this poor-quality study than it took to actually write it. This isn’t the first time Coyne has written something that may be a little uncomfortable for his publishers.1

Don’t get me wrong — it is, in my opinion, a very poor study. It deserved never to have been published (something I suspect that at least 20 percent of modern psychological research deserves).

But it’s both odd and awesome to see a blogger calling out the problems of a study published by the blogger’s own publisher. Odd in the sense of, “Wait a minute… Isn’t there a better way to do this? Shouldn’t we be leveraging these brilliant bloggers earlier on in the process, instead of conducting extensive post-hoc analyses?”

In my opinion, it suggests a serious disconnect — and lack of serious review by PLOS ONE. After all, PLOS ONE does have editorial standards.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to employ such bloggers as reviewers in your system, to ensure junk science such as this study never sees the light of day?

We hope the publishers at PLOS are listening. Because the best way to stop bad science in its tracks is to refuse to publish it in the first place. As PLOS ONE becomes a repository of anything with “data” in it, it loses its impact and importance. And indeed, PLOS is apparently losing its impact factor, and new journal submissions appear to be down as well.

There’s got to be a better way. Perhaps PLOS ONE is simply not immune to the crap research being regularly published by some of the world’s most prestigious journals, ranging from Pediatrics to Science to the Lancet. Or perhaps this sort of episode demonstrates the fatal flaws in the current review system, where reviewers seemingly have little incentive to reject bad research.

Read the full critique: Neurobalm: the pseudo-neuroscience of couples therapy

Footnotes:

1. He discontinued his blog — or his blog was discontinued for him — at Psychology Today over a dispute about the title of a blog entry he wrote. [↩]

Why I Support Open Access Publishing - How Corporations Score Big Profits By Limiting Access To Publicly Funded Academic Research

Recently I was doing some research through Google Scholar and found a couple of articles relevant to what I was searching for, only to discover that they were behind a paywall. Generally, the hard sciences are more easily available to the public (i.e., open access) while the social sciences are not.

Anyway, here is the fee for one article (from SciVerse: Science Direct [Elsevier]):

Brain microglia constitutively express β-2 integrins
Journal of Neuroimmunology, Volume 30, Issue 1, November 1990, Pages 81-93
H. Akiyama, P.L. McGeer

If you do not have a Username and Password, click the "Register to Purchase" button below to purchase this article.
Price: US $ 31.50

Here is the required fee for another article (ingentaconnect):

Endogenous Regulators of Adult CNS Neurogenesis
Theo Hagg,
Current Pharmaceutical Design, Volume 13, Number 18, June 2007 , pp. 1829-1840(12)

Buy and download full text article:
Price: $63.10 plus tax

To get these two articles would cost me nearly $100. In many cases, the article fee is for 24 hours only, so you are essentially renting the article for $30 to $60. This is only the consumer side of things. Authors pay to get their manuscripts published, and they often pay more--a lot more--if they want to allow open access to their work. The institutions where the authors are doing their research (universities, most times) then have to pay enormous subscription fees to have the journals in their libraries, and even if they opt for digital only, the costs continue to increase.

Here is an in-depth look at this issue from Think Progress.

How Corporations Score Big Profits By Limiting Access To Publicly Funded Academic Research

By Andrea Peterson on Mar 3, 2013

"Red and blue liquids inside graduated test tubes" by Horia Varlan 

used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

Here’s how the academic publishing industry works: Academics do research (frequently supported by public funds) and submit that research to journals, often paying “$600-$2,000 to either the publisher or the academic society that owns the journal” for the privilege of publication. Then journals send the research back out to other academics to be reviewed (typically pro-bono–a 2008 study estimated the worldwide worth of unpaid peer review was £1.9 billion a year), and the (often for-profit) journal publishers sell access to the published research, mostly to the academic institutions who do the majority of basic research.

The system is big business: The largest of the for profit academic publishers, Elsevier, reportedly earned over $1 billion in profits in 2011 with a profit margin around 35 percent and 71 percent of their revenue coming from academic customers like university libraries.

But the rapid inflation of journal subscription prices–the per subscription cost rose by 215% between 1986 and 2003–has left many of those universities struggling to keep up. In a statement last spring, the Harvard Faculty Council called rising costs to maintain access to scholarly works “untenable” and the University of California San Francisco Library spends 85 percent of their collection budget on journal subscriptions, but “[d]espite cancelling the print component of more than 100 journal subscriptions in 2012 to keep up with a budget reduction, [their] costs still increased by 3 percent.”

This major disconnect between how much of this research is funded and produced and who controls the final product has led to a flourishing Open Access movement with broad support among private and public academic institutions, focused on using technological innovations to democratize access to scholarly research and correct what they see as imbalances in the current system through reform on local and national levels. One such national reform they welcomed was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum outlining a plan to open up access to research to some federally funded research.

ThinkProgress’ coverage of that announcement drew criticism from an executive at Elsevier:

When reached for comment, Elsevier head of Corporate Relations Tom Reller agreed with her comment and confirmed Smith is VP for Global Internal Communications for Reed Elsevier subsidiary Elsevier, but referred questions about the company’s support of Open Access movement to its website and a recent statement of support for the White House’s proposal. Elsevier’s website says the company “will continue to identify access gaps, and work towards ensuring that everyone has access to quality scientific content anytime, anywhere.”

But their parent company’s lobbying disclosures in 2012 and members of the Open Access community suggest a very different position. When asked over email if they have seen Elsevier and many of the for-profit academic publishers actively cooperate with the Open Access movement on advancing public access to federally funded research, Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), balked at the suggestion:

Quite the opposite. SPARC and the Open Access community spent the first eight weeks of 2012 fighting The Research Works Act (H.R 3699) — a bill introduced into the House of Representatives with the sole aim of overturning the highly successful NIH Public Access Policy, and prohibiting other Federal Agencies from enacting similar policies. Elsevier and the American Association of Publishers were two of only three organizations who publicly endorsed the bill. 

If this was the first time they took this tactic, I might be tempted to cut them some slack. But it was a repeat performance; in 2008, they tried the same thing with “The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (H.R. 801)” — a bill that tried to amend U.S. copyright code to make the NIH Policy — and policies like it — illegal.

According to the U.S. Senate Lobbying Database, Elsevier’s parent company Reed Elsevier spent $1,420,000 lobbying the U.S. government in 2012. Reed Elsevier’s in-house lobbying team disclosures and those from the Podesta Group listing Reed Elsevier as a client corroborate Wilson’s comments about their support for The Research Works Act — only withdrawingsupport after a boycott of from academic communities, according to news reports. That boycott continues today, and has attracted over 13,000 scholars and academics who object to Elsevier’s business practices.

Reed Elsevier lobbied OSTP on “[c]opyright issues related to scientific, technology, and medical publications” during the run up to the White House’s Open Access announcement and their in-house lobbying team reported working on “[i]ssues related to science, technical, medical and scholarly publications” and on “all provisions” of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)–a proposal similar to the recently introduced Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) that would have required federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Elsevier was one of 81 publishers to sign a Association of American Publishers (AAP) letter opposing FRPAA, with AAP President and CEO Tom Allen calling it “little more than an attempt at intellectual eminent domain, but without fair compensation to authors and publishers.” Remember, these publishers claiming to be concerned about “fair compensation to authors,” are the same ones often charging them publication fees.

As Reller noted to ThinkProgress, the sum total of Reed Elsevier’s 2012 lobbying expenditures represents the all lobbying done in support of their business ventures and their disclosures list a number of bills unrelated to Open Access. Companies are not required to disclose what proportion of their total lobbying is spent on which topics. We do know that Elsevier, the corporate subsidiary involved with academic publishing, accounted for over 47 percent of Reed Elsevier’s adjusted operating profits in 2011.

While AAP released a statement in support of the White House’s plan Open Access memorandum, their comments praised how the plan only included guidelines for releasing research, not mandates, saying the policy’s success is dependent on “how the agencies use their flexibility to avoid negative impacts” on the current system and calling it fair “[i]n stark contrast to angry rhetoric and unreasonable legislation offered by some” — a reference to the Open Access movement. Elsevier’s similar response to the plan praised it for promoting “gold open access funded through publishing charges and flexible embargo periods for green open access” and dismissed Open Access legislative proposals, saying they would like “open-access advocates [to] withdraw their support from unnecessary and divisive open access legislation now introduced in the US at federal level.”

There’s ample room to credit the academic publishing industry’s history of serving as the shepherds of scholarly research — but technology has dramatically changed researchers’ ability to share knowledge without intermediaries. There is an ideological debate at hand, and it’s about if the public is better served by expanding access to the research they fund or protecting the interests of companies who have a substantial financial stake in limiting that access.

From Mean Land, an excellent article on the scam that is academic publishing. Where else can you make people (or institutions) pay to get their articles published and then make those same institutions pay incredible sums to have that journal in their library, and then make individuals like me pay between $10 and $50 dollars for access to the article (which is generally time limited, so I am not buying it so much as renting it)?

Open access fixes the problem, although now journals offer an open access option that costs the authors even more money then to get their article published - something needs to change. 

Academics are Revolting: The open access frontier

Posted at Friday 08 Jun
by Catherine Moffat.

Here’s the deal. You work hard to produce something, then sell it for a pittance. Perhaps you even give it away. The buyer ‘adds value’ and sells it back to you at an enormous profit. It’s standard sweatshop practice.

It can also be, in some cases, standard publishing practice. Authors and creators, keen to add the ‘value’ and prestige of a publisher to their work, or just excited that someone – anyone, is interested in publishing them, often give their work away with little thought of remuneration or what’s happening to their copyright.

Of course, publishers rightly argue they have the costs of editing, producing, advertising and distribution, not to mention the financial risks. It’s about adding value.

The rush to publish in ‘quality’ journals at any cost is particularly true of academic publishing. Academics are driven by a ‘publish or perish’ mandate where promotion and tenure is largely reliant on publishing and citation counts in accredited peer reviewed publications. Check out what’s happening at Sydney University (and coming soon to a university near you) where a retrospective performance marker of four research publications in the last three years is being used as one criteria to cull the ‘non performing’.

Of course, academics, unlike your average author, generally have the benefit of an income that is independent of their publications. As Louise Adler pointed out in The Australian last year, authors and creators not publishing in academia are probably in more actual danger of perishing, given, ‘the average annual income of Australian writers has declined in the past decade from $23,000 to a character-building $11,000.’
But while non-academic authors might be teetering on the breadline, operating outside of academic publishing models does provide the opportunity (and probably a more immediate incentive) to experiment with new modes of production.

In a recent appearance at the Sydney Writer’s Festival on a panel discussing the implications of the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Jeff Jarvis stressed the need for authors to develop new business models. While this may be good advice, many authors, and academic authors in particular, risk becoming trapped in their existing arrangements, relying on proving their publication record in traditional formats.

But as the cost of academic journals rise, many are asking who benefits most from the current model? Philip Soos in a piece on the Conversation, ‘The Great Publishing Swindle’, argues that what was intended as a public good has become a publishing monopoly.

Danny Kingsley, also writing on The Conversation about the US Research Works Act – A Small Bill in the US, a Giant Impact for Research Worldwide breaks it down like this:

‘Publicly funded research being undertaken by researchers who are often themselves (in Australia almost exclusively) also publicly funded, is written up and submitted to a publisher. The publisher sends it back out to the academic community to peer review the work, for no charge. Many of the editors of journals are also academics who again are doing the work gratis. The publisher then adds the journal design to the article and publishes it, charging disproportionally large subscription fees for access to the work. These fees are paid by university libraries, again, with public funding.’

And they are big fees. Each year university libraries pay millions of dollar to give scholars the right to access material that in the main has been provided by the same scholars, free of charge. Prices continue to increase while University budgets diminish and as Adam Habib outlines, developing countries are priced out of the market.

While authors are using the internet to experiment with new ways to reach their audience, many academics are also revolting and choosing open access publishing models that offer the same peer reviewed guarantee while allowing anyone who wants, access to their work.

Take a look at this open-access.net clip for a really simple overview:


Most users of the web, including authors and creators, aren’t interested in all this closed/open access and copyright stuff. Authors put their work on the internet and users take it for free if they can. Many people don’t realise that the internet is governed by the same copyright laws that exist in physical space. Others don’t care. But if you’ve been yawning behind your hand, consider this: One of the really interesting things about all the new google/facebook and other whizz gadgetry that allows your every move to be traced, is the potential to make it really easy to track the use of copyright material.

Unless you’re Kim.Dotcom making an estimated $175 million from alleged illegal filesharing, it’s unlikely you’ll find the FBI on your doorstep any time soon. I can’t help thinking, however, that we’ve been living in the digital equivalent of a frontier town, and sooner or later, for good or ill, the lawmen ride in and the frontier gets tamed.

Big Copyright has been slow to mobilize and grasp the monetary potential of the web, but it’s starting to lumber to its feet, and when it gets there you can be sure the 99% are going to be left hanging. PIPA and SOPA, the Research Works Act, extensions to copyright embedded in free trade agreements and similar actions are indications that the giant is awake now.

Copyright is like superannuation and interest rates – something no one pays attention to until they have to. But it’s important for authors and creators to think about how they want others to access their work. If you want others to access your work freely, make it clear. If you want them to pay, make it easy for them to do so. Read the contracts you sign. Because the reality is, if you don’t think about what’s happening to your copyright, someone else will.