| Autor: |
Abdullah, Abrizah, Arunachalam, Subbiah, Babini, Dominique, Barbour, Michael, Bawa, Ahmed, Boulton, Geoffrey, Brand, Amy, Drury, Luke, Gatti, Rupert, Joseph, Heather, Owango, Joy, Qinglin, Wang |
| Jazyk: |
angličtina |
| Rok vydání: |
2023 |
| Předmět: |
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| Zdroj: |
Abdullah, Abrizah and Arunachalam, Subbiah and Babini, Dominique and Barbour, Michael and Bawa, Ahmed and Boulton, Geoffrey and Brand, Amy and Drury, Luke and Gatti, Rupert and Joseph, Heather and Owango, Joy and Qinglin, Wang The Case for Reform of Scientific Publishing., 2023 [Report] |
| Druh dokumentu: |
Report |
| Popis: |
The publication and dissemination of the results of scientific inquiry are essential processes by which scientific knowledge and ideas are circulated and exchanged, scrutinized and tested. The efficient circulation of scientific output through a global network is vital to the production and use of knowledge. It has been, and will continue to be, the means by which distant minds interact to create new understanding and develop solutions to many of the problems confronting society. Humanity has benefitted greatly from the development of scientific publishing, which enabled the open science of recent centuries. A new era of open science, enabled by the digital revolution, now beckons. A globally effective publication system is indispensable to this new era. It is for these reasons that the International Science Council (ISC) has published its eight principles for scientific publishing shown in the companion piece to this paper, ‘Key Principles of Scientific Publishing’. The first and foremost principle stresses the central role of publishing as the enabler of the efficient and effective global network of ideas and information. The digital revolution of recent decades should have been a timely moment for step change in network functionality, providing the interactive communications system needed to satisfy the increasing demands placed on science. While some progress has been made (for example, the use of digital object identifiers for persistent reference linking across publishers), science publishing has so far failed to harness the full potential of digital functionality. Fully adopting the tools of this revolution could have vastly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge dissemination; created discriminatory navigation tools that gathered all new knowledge relevant to any researcher’s interests; ensured that data relevant to a published claims could be readily accessed and scrutinized; greatly improved the highly inefficient and ad hoc processes of peer review; more effectively opened the process of publication to innovation and greater bibliodiversity; maximized the extent to which the results of science are made available as a global public good; and made publication systems more accountable to the scientific community. Instead, we have a system where the dominant commercial players allow the interests of investors to take precedence over the needs of science. Excessive prices and profits fracture the international science community based on the ability to pay. Moreover, too much scientific output is unreproducible or shown to be fraudulent, damaging trust in the scientific enterprise. A major cause of these and other problems has been the way that scientists and their institutions use bibliometric indices to evaluate scientific careers. This has incentivized a ‘publish or perish’ culture, enabled large profits to be made, spawned a vast predatory publishing industry which adds little of value to the record of science1 , and deflected scientists from other scientific roles that will be vital to a new era of open science. The urgent need for reform has been recognized by many stakeholders in the scientific process, including governments. Such reforms must include the abandonment of bibliometric indices as sole indicators of excellence and the creation of a comprehensive index of the record of science. We should work towards a new cultural norm in which publishing, as an integral part of the scientific process, is accountable to the scientific community and to those that fund its work. The ISC will work with other stakeholders to achieve this, ensuring that scientific output is treated as a global public good, that scientific papers are freely accessible to all through a variety of open-access models, that a full index of the scientific record is created, that the peer review process is reformed, and that all of the ISC’s eight principles are observed. Digital advances will continue to change the publication and dissemination of scientific knowledge. If the ISC does not take an active role in leading and structuring this transformation, we risk having a system imposed on us which does not prioritize the interests of science, the very issue that caused this crisis in the first place. |
| Databáze: |
E-LIS (Eprints in Library & Information Science) |
| Externí odkaz: |
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