What is the scientific paper? 1: Observations

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Last year, after Science Online, I wrote a series of posts inspired by Ian Mulvany's question, what is the scientific paper? Those were originally posted on my old blog; now, with SoLo approaching once again, seems like a good time to revisit them, while migrating them over to Journalology.
Science Online charged us with answering the question, what is the scientific paper? Here is the answer. It comes from the perspective of somebody who has been middle author on just two, but who has spent a little bit of time working with them and with people who think a lot about them.
What does the scientific paper look like?

• It's a few thousand words -- probably between 4 and 15 pages long (but can be <1 >100 pages).
• It's mostly prose text, with a little bit of graphs, tables, and pictures.
• It has a set matter-of-fact style and structure.
• It's written in (American) English.¹

What is in the scientific paper?

• Who did the science.
• Why the science was done.
• How the science was done.
• Data!
• The authors' interpretation of what was achieved by doing the science.
• Pointers to the other bits of science mentioned.

Where is the scientific paper?

• It is in a journal, available in one or both of:
• printed on 4-15 sheets of dead trees, between a pair of glossy (or not so glossy) covers in the basement of a library.
• a journal website, possibly with technology deliberately designed to make it difficult and expensive to get to, probably only available in a clunky and poorly designed PDF file.
• It might also be in-part or in-full in a searchable database, like PubMed.
• If you're really lucky, it is available as HTML and XML.

What is the scientific paper for?

• It aims to be a complete, objective, reliable, and permanent record of a unit of science done.
• It's a way of telling your field what you've done.
• It's a way of telling your field what you've found.
• It's a way of giving data and resources to your field.
• It's a (the?) way of proving to your (potential) employer/funder that you have done something worthwhile.
• It's a way of making money for publishers

How is the scientific paper made?

• The authors are given some money and lab space on the condition that they use it to do some science and write a paper about it.²
• The authors do some science and write a paper about it.
• They give it to a journal. The journal thinks about it.
• Peer review! Months of scrutiny, discussion, and revisions.
• Production! The words are turned into PDFs and printed pages.

What is the scientific paper not?

• Part of a conversation.
• Quick and efficient.
• Diverse and flexible.
• Possible to edit after acceptance by the journal (except in extreme circumstances, and via slow and unsatisfactory mechanisms).
• Possible to edit by anybody except "the authors".
• A way of making your data and resources reusable.
• A way of telling the layperson what you've done and found.

Wait, that wasn't really what the question meant, you say? Well, indeed. But before we get to the real questions -- "what's wrong with the scientific paper?" and "what do you suppose we do about that?" -- it's good to define some terms and lay out the basics. Do you think I've got any of my observations wrong, or think I've overlooked some important property of the scientific paper? Do say -- it would be good to try to agree on what the paper is before going any further.
Footnotes

1. Thanks to Hannah who added this point in the comments on the old blog
2. Thanks to Cameron Neylon, ditto

Incentivising academic fraud

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Catching up with the newsfeeds after a week working in Beijing (where citizens are saved from reading such subversive content as Journalology -- as they are all Blogspot blogs), I notice the Economist discussing academic fraud in China.

Being the Economist, it attempts to explain China's fraud epidemic focus on incentives:

China may be susceptible, suggests Dr Cong Cao, a specialist on the sociology of science in China at the State University of New York, because academics expect to advance according to the number, not the quality, of their published works. Thus reward can come without academic rigour. Nor do senior scientists, who are rarely punished for fraud, set a decent example to their juniors.

The trouble with this explanation is that these same incentives apply in many -- most -- other countries also. Science everywhere is plagued by the publish-or-perish game and the incentives it generates. Academic careers stand and fall on the basis of publication counts. Some countries at least try to judge quality of output in addition to quantity, but most methods are no more sophisticated than that used by China -- and every method has its incentives for fraud.

Nor does a lack of disincentives in China explain why they stand out. Fraud is rarely satisfactorily punished anywhere. If it is even discovered at all, the photoshopped figures and made-up numbers become an accident; the original data was lost sometime after that project was completed; the grad student who handled that particular experiment has moved on, and can no longer be contacted. A researcher getting fired for fraud is big news, not because fraud is rare, but because failing to weasel out of an allegation is rare.

It is my fear that China is perceived as having a higher rate of fraud compared to other countries not because it does, but because Chinese researchers aren't very good at it yet. Their fiddled figures are crude and easily spotted; their fictitious facts are amateur inventions that can not be believed. The worrying thing about these rough and unrefined fabrications is not that they themselves, easily found out and struck from the record, exist. The worrying fact is that they must be the tip of a great iceberg; 99% of the fakes are unseen, produced by forgers skilled enough to mask their work in convincing disguises and cover their tracks perfectly. As science in China matures, and the student to supervisor ratio falls and natural selection picks the cleverest conmen, the epidemic of clumsy and primitive fraud will end. That's when China joins the ranks of countries experiencing advanced and undetectable fraud epidemics.

Discussing fraud as a symptom of a Chinese problem -- of a failure of Chinese academic administration or a flaw in the Chinese culture and psyche -- is a nice distraction from the uncomfortable fact that fraud is a symptom of a global problem -- of failing academic administration everywhere. The Chinese copied the publish-or-perish game from the west. Soon they'll get good at it.

New word - evoluating

"Evoluating". It's probably an attempt to use the French "évoluer" in English, I think it means "evolving".

The Scientist has an attack of CNS disease

The Scientist this week tells us that

"Peer review isn’t perfect [who knew?]— meet 5 high-impact papers that should have ended up in bigger journals."

Wait, what? These high-impact papers got those citations despite ending up in "second tier" journals, so I doubt the authors have been crying into their beer about this "injustice". This is an example of CNS Disease, a term coined by Harold Varmus to characterise the obsession with Cell, Nature and Science. Not all high-impact papers must published in one of these journals, and not all papers published in these journals will be high impact. Biomedical publishing is not just a game in which editors sort articles by predicted future impact - at least, I hope it's not.

Authors chose their publication venue for all sorts of reasons, and it's hard to predict which new work will set the world on fire. Take BLAST - it was a "quick and dirty" algorithm that gave similar results to the Smith and Waterman algorithm only much faster, and the gain in speed came at a loss of accuracy. Only use by scientists in practice could decide whether this was a good approach. Focussing on the umpteen thousand citations to BLAST is missing the point: the important thing about BLAST is the millions or billions of hours of computer time saved by using it. As Joe, the other denizen of Journalology Towers, said recently:

"Lord protect us from the idea that an academic publication might have any value beyond its ability to accumulate citations."

The stuff we didn't have time to blog about in July

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Some old fashioned publishers are still claiming that open-access mandates -- by forcing the publishers to acknowledge that the internet has happened and that this event makes the status quo business model that they cling to wasteful and unsustainable -- will "stifle innovation". In other news, war has been found to be peace and it was discovered that freedom is slavery.

An unexpected and not entirely welcome development in open science: the Information Commissioner -- charged with enforcing the UK's freedom of information act -- has ruled that data collected by a Queen's University Belfast researcher falls under the remit of the act, and the data must now be released. This seems to be something of an accidental victory for open science, though rather unfortunate that it should come about as the result of a stunt by a climate change denier, and not as part of a planned, consensual, and multilateral shift in academic culture. I've yet to see much written on the repercussions of the decision (though I am a little behind on reading).

WikiReviews? A potentially interesting project for collaborating on "living" review articles, initially on cancer, introduced by George Lundberg.

Scientists who end up in industry could inadvertently find themselves in trouble when the natural tendency of the scientist to share information for the benefit of mankind conflicts with the natural tendency of big companies to jealously and zealously guard everything they have. In the US, researchers innocently publishing a scientific paper can face (at least, the threat of) decades in prison for industrial espionage if they're not very careful.

Elsevier experiments with peer review

Well I never. I've been advocating the adoption of open peer review and community peer review for a while now; I didn't expect one of the pioneers of community peer review to be Elsevier, but they've surprised me.

On 21 June, they announced a three-month trial of what they are calling PeerChoice on Chemical Physics Letters, which allows potential reviewers to volunteer to review papers. As Ida Sim points out, this doesn't open up peer review in the sense of making it more transparent, but it should help speed up peer review and it might avoid the bias caused by editors selecting from a limited pool of the same 'usual suspect' reviewers.

The devil is in the details: who gets to be in the pool of potential reviewers; how will you motivate reviewers to volunteer, when getting reviewers to agree when directly inviting them can be hard enough; will volunteers be vetted for suitability for that article; is this alongside or instead of editorial selection? These question aside, let's hope it's a success.

---
Edit: There's some answers on the hidden-away page about PeerChoice - PeerChoice is supplementary to editor-invited reviewers. Registered reviewers will see titles and abstracts and be allowed to download the manuscript if they agree to provide a "timely review." There doesn't appear to be a vetting/vetoing system, but the editor still makes the decision. The trial is on nanostructures and materials; the results might not be applicable outside that very narrow field as scholars in different fields react in very different ways to variations in the peer review process.

Green is no goal

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
To achieve a sufficiently large but distant win, it is worth sacrificing a much smaller but nearer win if it stands in the way or distracts and delays the larger achievement. To achieve a small but near win, it is not worth sacrificing a much larger but more distant win. But the difference in magnitude must be sufficiently large, and the difference in distance sufficiently small, to make delaying the gratification really pay off. Speculation and argument over the sizes and distances and relative probabilities of success and incompatibilities of the competing achievements fuel many a political argument.
Like "green" open access.
Green open access is simple: for every scientific journal paper, at least one of the authors must take action to ensure that the paper is freely available to the world online, somehow. They can deposit the text in PubMed central, or put a crude PDF of a draft version on their website. The increasingly preferred method for many advocates of green OA, though, is the institutional repository: each university library manages its own database of affiliated researchers' papers. This will solve the problem: the inability of people to read a paper that they want to read.
A heresy for you: access is not an interesting problem. The stubborn toll access publishers are correct when they say that most people can read most of the papers that they want to read. Yes, it takes emails to the authors, piracy amongst friends, and borrowed passwords, and yes it is a real problem, and no, the toll access publishers do not have any excuse to do nothing about it. But it's not an interesting problem any more. Letting us read a paper for free, without having to log-in or pester the author, once the paper reaches twelve months old, is not a revolution.
There are other similarly dull problems in science and publishing that green OA doesn't address. Like how to save university libraries from the parasitic subscription access publishers that are slowly killing their helpless hosts. Green OA tells parasitic publishers that they can continue draining libraries of their budgets with subscription bundles to poor quality journals that few people want to read, so long as they open access to the papers after twelve months. Now, as libraries face their greatest budget squeezes of the recession, is the perfect time for them to get some guts, speak up, say 'no', and shake off these parasites once and for all, before somebody comes along and hides them behind a bigger and stickier sticking plaster. Students should be rioting at the news that they are expected to do without textbooks and computers because their library has chosen instead to spend the several tens of thousands of pounds on a package of obscure and substandard journals. Instead, we're distracted by green OA, told that it is the one thing that academia desperately needs.
More interesting than these little problems are the opportunities that are currently presented to us: the real revolutions. Open, structured, reusable data has already demonstrated its revolutionary credentials in the field of genomics. Genome data that can be searched and mined by powerful computers and clever algorithms has enabled cheap and easy high-throughput hypothesis testing, and even hypothesis generation: it has led to countless discoveries that weren't on anybody's mind when they set out to collect the data, because the database as a whole is worth far more than the sum of the individual data gathering experiments. There are vast quantities of data in the literature: from microscopy to biogeography, epidemiological trends to drug toxicity. There are great and important discoveries waiting to be made in that data. But they're not being made, because unlike with genomics, no organisation has made the effort to build the database; no campaign group has achieved a mandate that the data be made open and reusable. Instead, the data, where it is available at all, is locked away in non-standard tables within unstructured PDF files, distributed across largely subscription access journals that reserve all rights to reuse.Gold open-access at least, by making literature mining possible, doesn't stifle these new open data opportunities, even if it's not the full solution; green open-access, by focussing on the need for access to human readable literature, distracts us from these possibilities entirely.
Or open notebook science: a model that, by getting scientists to discuss their ideas and publish their experiments in the open in real time, would force a revolution in the way that scientists work, the way that groups compete and collaborate, and the way that careers are evaluated and achievement rewarded; a revolution to the whole rhythm and pace of scientific discovery and the individual scientist's working life. A revolution that rather makes the whole issue of access to journal papers go away altogether.
Green OA advocates argue that open science, open data, and ONS are vague and fantastical distractions from the pressing matter of human access to journal articles; the we shouldn't waste time thinking about the former until we have solved the latter. I believe that green OA is a mundane and increasingly irrelevant distraction from the real problems and opportunities that are available for science to solve and grasp, but for a limited time only. The long-term achievements are too big to risk for the sake of such a small one.
Why spend time designing a better horse shoe when you could be inventing the railway train?

(Apologies for the unpolished post - this was made from my phone on the side of a Welsh mountain.)

Literature hacks: PubMed searches by RSS

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
There are all sorts of ways you could find out about new articles that you might want to read. There's that big room across campus that's full of old writings on paper, but that's too far away and they have some silly rule about not eating your lunch near their writings on paper, and anyway you're not sure you still have the card that lets you in. You can't trust your colleagues to point out an article that isn't crushingly mediocre, unless it's because it concerns a species or a disease whose name sounds mildly amusingly puerile, but those ones are never actually remotely related to your work. You subscribe to electronic tables of contents, but these days everyone's publishing in PLoS ONE, and you're not wading through their contents every week in the hope of finding the occasional thing that's relevant. You could regularly search PubMed, but that means typing in keywords over and over, and wading through the results asking yourself, "have I seen this paper already, or do I just feel like I've seen this paper already?"

So you could subscribe to email alerts for your PubMed searches, but my god, man, what the hell do you think you're doing? What, you haven't got enough email already? Make you feel special, having your phone stop you every five minutes with unimportant impersonal notifications? If it's not private, not time-critical, and does not require a reply, it should not be pestering you with an email. That article has taken ten years to get from concept to publication, it can wait a little longer for you to read it -- not that you even read more than one in every twenty of the articles you're alerted to.

Which is why it should be obvious to any of our readers why they should be using HubMed's RSS feeds of PubMed searches, with their Google Reader, to keep up with the literature. New articles will accumulate and be available to scroll through in the sophisticated and cleanly laid out environs of the Google Reader, when it's convenient for you to read them. Reader will tick off items that you've seen and present to you items that you haven't yet seen, without ever screaming "look at me, look at me right now!"

Update: Since I originally wrote this, PubMed released their major update, introducing their own implementation of RSS saved searches, which looks at least as good as that of HubMed, and takes less effort to set up -- just click the RSS button next to the search box on the search results page.

"Predatory" open access publishers

The Charleston Adviser has published an interesting analysis of some of the recent open access 'upstarts', titled "“Predatory” Open-Access Scholarly Publishers". They include some that I've noted before such as Bentham Open and Scientific Journals International.

As I would have expected, Libertas Academica and its sister publisher Dove Press do better than the others included in this review, but they are still far from passing with flying colours. The reviewer, Jeffrey Beall of Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, places a very clear "author beware" sign on:

• Academic Journals
• Academic Journals
• ANSINetswork
• Bentham Open
  
• Insight Knowledge
• Knowledgia Review
• Science Publications
• Scientific Journals International

Beall's summary is worth repeating:

"These publishers are predatory because their mission is not to promote, preserve, and make available scholarship; instead, their mission is to exploit the author-pays, Open-Access model for their own profit.
They work by spamming scholarly e-mail lists, with calls for papers and invitations to serve on nominal editorial boards. If you subscribe to any professional e-mail lists, you likely have received some of these solicitations. Also, these publishers typically provide little or no peer-review. In fact, in most cases, their peer review process is a façade.
None of these publishers mentions digital preservation. Indeed, any of these publishers could disappear at a moment’s notice, resulting in the loss of its content."

I'd not touch any of them with a bargepole.

Why you can't copy abstracts into Wikipedia

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
This is an archival repost of something first published elsewhere a year ago.

I am not a lawyer, but I do have six years experience of Wikipedia, was once a very prolific Wikipedian, and, despite my lack of activity there in more recent years, am apparently still an "admin" on the English language Wikipedia. This, coupled with working for an open-access publisher, means that I have also picked up a little knowledge of (mostly US & UK) copyright over the years. Since I can't boil all that down to just 250 characters (or whatever the limit is), this post serves to answer this question, raised at FriendFeed: 'Does an article in pubmed belong to the "legal public domain", can I copy and paste it in wikipedia?'

The answer is 'no'. I don't endorse this position, and I'm not trying to be a killjoy, but it is the correct answer nonetheless. Since there appears to be some confusion over why the answer is 'no', let me explain. First I'll define some terms, then the copyright status of journal abstracts, and finally why the policy of Wikipedia must be to exclude abstracts.

First the definitions. Don't quote me on these. Like I say, IANAL. These are all just definitions that I have picked up over the years in the context of Wikipedia and open-access. In order of increasing protection of rights:

• Public domain: completely exempt from all rights given by copyright law. Anyone can reprint it, remix it, and make money selling it, with no obligations.
• Public/copyleft licensed, e.g. GFDL, CC-BY: the producer of the work has asserted their ownership and claim their rights, but have voluntarily given everyone in the world permission to do certain things with the work without having to ask first. There are actually several tiers of these licenses.
• Copyright: you're not allowed to do anything with the work, unless the copyright owner has said you can.

Public domain is not a synonym for "publicly available". Something is not "in the public domain" just because it is on the internet -- indeed, most of the internet is not public domain, it falls in that third category. There is no presumption that you are allowed copy and paste material all over the internets. Perhaps there are corners of the internet where that is de facto the case, and perhaps it would be great if everything was public domain or copyleft, but it's not. Napster was a place where music was de facto public domain, before the recording industry reminded them that the law doesn't work that way. However, there is a fourth area to copyright: fair use.

Fair use is not a fourth category, like the categories above. Fair use is just a set of exemptions to copyright protections. It allows you to make use of copyrighted material without the owner's permission to do so. However, it is very limited: you may only use a limited amount of the copyright material, and you can only do a limited range of things with it. If you want to use something copyrighted and say that you are doing so under fair use provisions, you have to make the case for your specific creation being fair use of the material. Getting away with claiming fair use for an abstract in PubMed does not mean that you will get away with it for Wikipedia, or some other creation. And the copyright owner is always within their rights to object to your fair use claim.

The copyright status of journal abstracts. Copyright to most journal abstracts will be owned by the journal's publisher (or society). Copyright to others will be owned by the authors. For open-access papers, the copyright is usually owned by the authors, but the journal has made sure that they have released it under a copyleft license, allowing you to do lots of things with their work. Papers written by employees of US federal agencies in the course of their employment will be public domain, as will very old papers.

It is true that there is a culture amongst scientists of free movement of published ideas. Copyright is worthless to a scientist, who actively wants his ideas to spread, so long as he is cited and acknowledged. Scientists freely share and reprint things like abstracts.

Scientists assume that publishers feel the same about all use of "their" material. Note the fierce and desperate opposition some of the traditional publishers raise against the open-access movement, though. Ideas mean different things to a scientist and to a (traditional) publisher. You shouldn't presume that publishers will react in the same laid-back way as scientists do when the words that "belong" to them are used in novel ways.

Note that PubMed carefully argues the case that its use of abstracts falls under fair use provisions. It doesn't just say "yeah, whatever, everyone freely reproduces abstracts, no one cares."

Why you can't turn abstracts into Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia can't be laid back about copyright any more than PubMed can. Wikipedia is now, what, a top-ten website by most metrics? People notice things that are put on Wikipedia. If you start putting abstracts on it, somewhere a publisher will notice, not like it, and have the material removed. You could claim fair use, but (and remember, IANAL), I very much doubt you would be successful: an encyclopedia is very different to an index, and in Wikipedia you are remixing the material. Well, whatever. One page gets deleted. No lasting harm done. End of story?

Not exactly. Wikipedia is GFDL. What you put on Wikipedia gets copied to hundreds of mirrors and put in paper versions. People use it for whatever commercial purposes they want, and it gets remixed to death. It's difficult to undo what goes into Wikipedia. That is why, when you write in Wikipedia, you must declare either that the words are your own, or that they are already released under a compatible copyleft license. You are not just giving permission for your words to be used on Wikipedia, you are giving permission for your words to be reused and remixed for virtually any purpose. This is why Wikipedia has to be pretty careful not to let copyright violations through.

This is also why Wikipedia does not actually allow any text to be contributed as fair use (except when marked as quotations): the permissions granted by Wikipedia are just too great for the fair use claim to be defensible.

But can't Wikipedia make an exception for abstracts? Theoretically, perhaps it could be done, but sadly, the reality is 'no'. Wikipedia is too big, too old, too well known, too bureaucratic. Wikipedia's policy on copyrights is well established; it must be generalist, covering all fields and all nations, and it can't afford to be lax. To come up with exceptions to the policy would be too difficult for such a generalist site with such a tiny legal team. The Wikipedians would have to establish beyond doubt that publishers were happy for their abstracts to be used not just on the encyclopedia, but by anyone, anywhere, for virtually any purpose, reprinted and remixed. And that sounds like the open-access movement to me.

Conclusions. You can't put (non-open access) abstracts on Wikipedia. It would be nice if the gentlemen's agreement whereby publishers overlooked reuse of their material by scientists extended to all spheres, but that ain't necessarily so. Of course, it would great if it were so, and the story is just one of thousands which emphasise the need for a more rational and restricted copyright system.

Amusing typo of the day

The authors of a manuscript say their work has been approved by an "intuitional review board". I suppose it just knows when a study is ethical.

Medical Hypotheses' editor is sacked

So Bruce Charlton's editorship at Medical Hypotheses comes to an end, and I must raise a small cheer. Schadenfreude is an ugly thing, but this journal was a boon to fringe 'scientists' everywhere, giving them the apparent legitimacy of publishing in a 'proper journal' (owned by Elsevier, indexed in PubMed) without the pesky hurdle of peer review. It was no surprise that it favoured kooks, having been set up by David Horrobin, a pusher of evening primose oil.

The final straw was allowing AIDS denialists a platform, and the subsequent outcry from scientists and Charlton's inability to see what he did wrong led Elsevier to pull the plug. Charlton thinks that as an editor he has a perfect right to publish whatever papers he wishes, but unaccountable editorial control is no way to run a journal. Poor editorial decisions should have consequences, and the lack of any peer review or other quality control on Medical Hypotheses (the only criterion being that a paper was 'interesting') always doomed it to be derided by serious scientists and medics.

Will the new (and improved?) Medical Hypotheses see any more gems like too much sex causing RSI, kissing evolving to spread germs, cancer being caused by stopping smoking, masturbation being good for relieving a bunged up nose, or the origin of belly button fluff?

Peer review in the dock

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Academic publishing, and peer review in particular, was headline news in February -- from stem cell researchers claiming that their work was being sabotaged by reviewers with conflicts of interest, to mainstream news noticing the absurdity of the impact factor situation. BBC Radio 4 must have decided that now was a good time to air an unedited repeat of 2008's documentary Peer Review in the Dock. So now certainly seems like a good time to post an unedited repeat of my comments from the time.

--

A few thoughts on Peer Review In The Dock (this evening, Radio 4).

1. Nobody has ever questioned whether peer review is really needed: wrong. A lot of people have questioned this, and many experiments have been tried. The most prominent recent example is probably PLoS ONE (no reference to this in the programme). They very rapidly discovered that, yes, a minimum standard is peer review is required when running a journal. But perhaps moving to a non-review model is like communism: you need to have world revolution for it to have any chance of working; going it alone will just lead to your own collapse.
2. Peer-reviewers aren't trained: somewhat misleading. Reviewers, at least in the publishing model that I am familiar with, are actively publishing research scientists of at least medium seniority. Most will, while pursuing their doctorates, have participated in "journal clubs" (where the grad students get together to shred a published paper), and many will also have co-reviewed manuscripts alongside their supervisors (not strictly allowed, but very widespread). What all students certainly are trained to do, even at undergraduate level, is not to take the truth of published work for granted, and to watch for potential flaws. To teach science is to teach scepticism. Which brings me on to the next point...
3. Reviewers aren't all that great at spotting errors: so what? Academics and publishers know this. The system is designed this way. Review is supposed to be a basic filter for sanity and competence; it is only journalists who hear "peer-reviewed" and think it is the definitive stamp of authenticity. Like democracy and trial-by-jury, it is not used because it works, but because it fails less disastrously than the alternatives. (Incidentally, their example of introducing deliberate errors to a paper and seeing who notices them is not entirely fair: most papers are not only reviewed by the journals reviewers, but by the authors' colleagues before they submit the manuscript, and by editors before review.)
4. The last part of the programme was devoted to publication bias. Publication bias is a big problem. But it has little, if anything, to do with peer-review, and everything to do with publisher policies and author dishonesty. The only conceivable connection it has with peer-review is that some people still mistakenly believe that negative results aren't worth publishing at all -- something that journals like BMC Research Notes and PLoS ONE, and initiatives like trial registration are explicitly tackling.

The programme explored what is an interesting issue in academic publishing at the moment (there are more interesting issues, of course), but, I think, from the wrong perspective. While it discussed many very real problems with the system, these problems are all well known and acknowledged; for decades people have explored solutions, and there are many interesting current developments. The makers of the programme seemed mostly unaware of these.

This is, of course, the limitation of having a half-hour national radio programme about a topic like academic publishing.

Peter Suber's open access word contest

Peter Suber, the guru of open access, has challenged readers of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter to come up with a new word.

English speakers need a verb that means "to provide OA to". It should be as succinct as "sell" for use in sentences such as, "We sell the print edition but ____ the digital edition."

Oh, the joys of verbing a noun. Here are my entries:

• "Openpublished"; "to openpublish" (or "open-published", "to open-publish"). Apparently there is already a meaning of "open publishing", which is to make the process of publishing transparent (open peer review would be an aspect of this, as well as Indymedia and Wikinews), but I think the term is little used.
• "Commoned"; "to common". Meaning "to place into the commons", as most OA publishing uses the Creative Commons licenses.
• "Publicked"; "to publick". Meaning "to make public". It's an archaic word, used by Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, sometimes meaning "published", sometimes meaning "populated", and recently resurfacing to mean making a private message public.
  
• "Freeshared"; "to freeshare" (echoing freeware and shareware). This term is already a synonym for freecycling, and for a defunct image upload site.
• "Openshared"; "to openshare" (echoing open source and shareware). This term is already used for an icon that represents the open sharing of content - an icon that could be adopted by the open access movement.
  
• "Copylefted"; "to copyleft". Using the existing term, which refers to Creative Commons and GNU GPL licenses among others.
  
• Referring to libre and gratis: "Libred"; "to libre". "Gratised"; "to gratis".

Can you do better? Seize the glory by emailing Peter.

The Open Share icon is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License from http://www.openshareicons.com/.