[Insight-users] Open science: Career investment?

Sat Apr 5 23:19:31 EDT 2008

Hi Carlos,

It is true that your publishing record in traditional
decadent journals and conferences is still the measure
used for making hiring, promotions, and tenure decisions.

It will be several years before this obscure practice
disappears. It typically takes one human generation
(~20 years) to perform any fundamental social change.
(see the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions

Professionals who have already build their careers based on a
publishing and patenting record have an invested interest in
keeping the current decadent system in place.

It is therefore in your best career interest to continue
publishing in the obtuse venues where "originality" and the
obsession with "my method is the best" are still the norm.
You will still need such record in your resume in order to
apply for jobs, and to obtain promotions.

However, in the coming ten to twenty years, as the current
establishment goes into retirement, the new generation
that has been raised in the Information Age will replace
the publishing system with de-facto Open Access practices.

The Insight Journal doesn't have a recorded impact factor,
and it is very unlikely that we will pursue one.

The standard impact factor is computed by taking all the papers
of a journal in a period of two years, and counting how many
times they have been cited in the third year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Calculation

It is therefore, by definion, an *incestuous measure*.
The Impact Factor doesn't reflect how much benefit the
papers/journals bring to society. It measures how much
papers published in a given Journal help to produce more
papers.

Such logic only makes sense for the misguided people who think
that "producing papers" is the final goal of any scientific
endeavor.

As with any other component of the current publishing
system, the impact factor is *not reproducible*. The magic
number is "generated" by a division of Thomson Scientific,
http://scientific.thomson.com/free/essays/journalcitationreports/impactfactor/
but their data is not made available for verification,
and a study has reported that even when the data is
delivered by Thomson Scientific the recipients can *not*
reproduce the computation of the published number.

For details, please see the paper "Show me the Data",
in the Journal of Cell Biology: (open access)
http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/1091

The notion that the impact factor of a journal
correlates to the quality of the papers in a journal
is a flawed argument resulting for poor statistical
reasoning. Citation of journals follow the behavior
of networked systems (see "Linked" by Albert-Lazlo
Barabasi):
http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else-Means/dp/0452284392/ref=pd_sim_b_img_1

Just as in social networks, the impact factor of a
Journal is driven by a minority of papers that are
highly cited, while the vast majority of papers are
very rarely cited.

----

Your decision of publishing on the Insight Journal
should not be guided by your career strategies.

It should be simply rooted in the following questions:

   "Why do you want to do research?"

   "What is it about reasearch
    that wake up your interest?"

   "Why not being a novelist or a writer ?"
   "Why not working in a bank from 9am to 5pm ?"

Publishing in Open Access Journals, and supporting
reproducible research, is not a career strategy,
it is simply the right-thing to do when you have
an appreciacion for the basis of the scientific
method.

On the positive side, there is no real overlap
of effort when it comes to publishing in decadent
journals or publishing in progressive venues like
the Insight Journals, or in the PLoS ONE Journal.

The kind of papers that you prepare for decadent journals,
we don't want them in the Insight Journals. We don't want
papers with pretty pictures that can't be reproduced, or
that were generated with source code that is not available,
or with parameters that nobody can verify, or with methods
that were submitted to the US Patent office a couple of
days before the paper was submitted to the Journal.

The kind of practical and useful papers that you can submit
to the Insght Journal, would never be accepted by the decadent
journals. Most of them will be judged "not original enough".
They are more interested in "innovation" that nobody can
verify. They like the "originality" that only works once.

It is therefore very simple:

    Every time that you find something useful
    that you think can be reused by others,
    and you want to share it with the community
    then you publish it in the Insight Journal.
    We don't want "new" things.
    We want things that work,
    and that work more than once.

    Every time that you find something that
    seems to be "new", but you are not sure if
    it really works, and that is so irrelevant
    that can wait dragging one or two years in
    the ropes of the decadent publishing system
    before is shared with the community, then you
    send that to the decadent journals and conferences.
    They love that kind of material.

In the interest of making sure that you will be employed
at the end of your university training, please continue
submitting papers to decadent journals. Your mentors are
correct in that point. But, simply keep in mind that this
practice is as visionary as recording music in cassette
tapes, or openning a store that sells floppy diskettes,
or creating a company that fabricates punch cards for
computers. Their time has passed.

    Best regards,

      Luis

-----------------------------
Carlos Sánchez Mendoza wrote:
> Dear insight users,
> 
> as a newbie in medical image processing I am aware of the importance
> of initiatives such as open science and experiment reproducibility.
> 
> I am a big defender of useful research as opposed to publishable research.
> 
> My co-researchers keep on talking skeptical about insight journal,
> open science and so on. They insist I need to do traditional
> publishing in order to gain appropiate credentials for career
> developing. They give much importance to index of impact regarding
> publications.
> 
> I would like to know what Insight Journal's index of impact is, and
> how useful it would be for a beginning scientist to get involved in
> the open science movement, regarding his/her career expectations, from
> a general point of view.
> 
> I am a firm believer. I have fought for introducing NA-MIC kit and
> open science in my research environment with little success. I am
> being discouraged by my mentors for the sake of traditional paper
> publishing and career investing.
> 
> I hope the answer will help others as well, but am aware of the
> difficulty of providing a response. Just wanted to start some
> discussion on the topic.
> 
> Thank you very much.
> 
> Carlos S. Mendoza.
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