How can we ensure that the global south benefits from and contributes to the field of bioethics?

Here's a re-post of my Editorial in the current issue of Developing World Bioethics. I will update toward the end of the Editorial relevant information about the upcoming IAB World Congress in India, as some things (like the location) have changed since the Editorial was published.

There has been a legitimate debate going on for many years about the question of how we can ensure that colleagues in the global south can both benefit from journals such as this, as well as contribute constructively to it.

The issue of access to subscription‐based journals has been litigated ad nauseam and I do think global publishers have done by and large a decent job in terms of implementing with WHO and other agencies myriad access themes available to those countries too resource‐constrained to afford regular subscriptions.1

Some authors disagree, insisting that only Open Access journals, a supposedly superior business model, can address the access problem adequately. And they are right, Open Access journals, by definition, pose no access problems of the kind subscription‐based journals pose. Sadly, having your cake and eating it too rarely works in the real world, and so these authors, having resolved the access to academic research problem, are faced with a different problem they did not have before. Open Access journals can only survive as viable enterprises if a sufficiently high number of authors pay what are often expensive article processing charges, or APCs. These journals often offer their equivalent to the access schemes subscription‐based journals have put in place, namely differential fees or fee waivers for those who absolutely cannot afford to pay.

Short of asking academics to exploit themselves by volunteering to produce and disseminate academic journals and their content, reliably, over decades, someone will have to pay for the resource intensive production of journals and to ensure the reliable availability of their content.

I have yet to see from those complaining about access problems realistic solutions to this challenge. They mostly, and typically correctly identify the problem, but beyond grandstanding they offer no answers. They expect someone else to sort things out for them.

As I said, authors in the global south can access our content either by means of the access schemes mentioned earlier, or by simply emailing the authors of content they are interested in and by asking those authors for a complimentary electronic copy of their article. Nobody would decline such a request.

I do think that a much greater challenge is to enable scholars from the global south to participate in international conferences and workshops both to share their own knowledge, but also to learn from colleagues and to network with a view to establishing research partnerships and the like.

I suspect you will know Facebook. I posted a photo from a workshop I had organised in the summer of 2017 in the UK, on the most recent version of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) research ethics guidelines. Not unexpectedly a colleague, located in an upmarket London‐based university, harangued me for the lack of diversity, perhaps most significantly, the evident lack of attendees from the global south. That colleague was right: only two of the 25 or so workshop delegates came from the Caribbean, while everyone else came from countries of the global north. Of course, I had virtually no funding to organise said workshop, and everyone who travelled there paid their own way. Nobody's flight was covered by me. I did have inquiries from various colleagues in the global south who would have loved to attend, but quickly gave up on the idea due to lack of funds for their travel expenses. The colleague who criticized me quite publicly, naturally, had no funds to offer either. It is always easier to criticize than to contribute meaningfully to change. The same, as I tried to show, holds true for academics who refuse to acknowledge the cost involved in producing academic journals.

Some constructive attempts have been made to have a more globally representative group of conference goers presenting at and attending international bioethics events. A successful example of this is the Global Forum on Bioethics and Research. The GFBR has been around for a longish time. It's funded mostly by the UK's Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation, the US NIH Fogarty International Center and the UK's Medical Research Council. I had a quick look at the GFBR's website, with a view to finding out who governs it, and who decides on the composition of speakers and attendees of its meetings, given that its funders reside essentially in the USA and the UK. It seems to me as if the majority of those people are either staff members of these funding organisations, or are past/current grant recipients.2 There appear to be very few truly independent scholars from the global south among those in charge of organising these global events.
I don't think that this is the result of any kind of malicious intent. It's likely a function of ‘who do we know who could serve on that steering committee who is from Africa, Asia etc’, and who does one know? Well, the answer is likely to be: ‘someone we have funded before’.
However, that alone does not address the question of whether or not the meetings are failures when it comes to the question of participants from the global south. Here are the criteria the GBFR uses to determine who among the applicants will be invited3 :

• Country of origin: GFBR would like to ensure a representative distribution of delegates from different regions;
• Background /current area of expertise: GFBR is aimed at anyone involved or interested in health research ethics, including researchers, policy‐makers and community representatives. GFBR seeks representation from many different disciplines;
• Membership of an IRB/REC: Membership of an Institutional Review Board / Research Ethics Committee is not a prerequisite for attending GFBR, but may be taken into consideration;
• Experience of ethics: GFBR encourage s a mixture of ‘old’ and ‘new’ faces at each forum so that participants can productively discuss issues of concern to them and gain from the perspectives of others. Applicants need not be experts in ethics;
• Reasons for attending the meeting: GFBR seeks participants who will be able to actively contribute to the meeting and who expect to impact on research ethics and/or pursue a career in research ethics in their own country.

While there is the inevitable number of people who presumably just have to be at every such meeting (let's call them ‘old’ faces), the GFBR has succeeded in terms of attracting a fairly wide range of delegates from the global south to its meetings over the last few years. It's a small (and expensive) meeting, designed to host about 80 delegates, but it's probably a meeting as good as they come on the global bioethics scene. I truly wish there were more such events on the global bioethics events’ calendar. I do encourage you to give thought to how this sort of event can be replicated, for other areas of bioethics, ie. not the typically well‐funded area of research ethics but, say, for reproductive health, global health, and so on and so forth.

Let me end this editorial by encouraging you to attend the next World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics. It will be held in Bangalore from 4–7 December 2018 under the theme Health for all in an unequal world: obligations of global bioethics and is locally hosted by SAMA, the resource group for women's health, the Forum for Medical Ethics Society, and, of course, the IAB.4 With a bit of luck (and planning) there might be a plenary dedicated to figuring out how to enable more delegates from the global south to attend such events. Why don't you propose to organise such a plenary to the India‐based hosts of the event? They might consider it quite seriously.

Notes

• 1 Schuklenk U. 2015. Fighting Imaginary Enemies in Bioethics Publishing. Bioethics 29(8): ii‐iii. Schuklenk U, Magnus D. 2017. Justice and Bioethics: Who Should Finance Bioethics Publishing? AJOB 17(10): 1‐2.
• 2 http://www.gfbr.global/about-the-gfbr/ [Accessed 28 November 2017].
• 3 http://www.gfbr.global/forum-meetings/ [Accessed 28 November 2017].
• 4 http://www.iab2018.org [Accessed 12 April 2018]

How can we ensure that the global south benefits from and contributes to the field of bioethics?

There has been a legitimate debate going on for many years about the question of how we can ensure that colleagues in the global south can both benefit from bioethics journals such as this, as well as contribute constructively to them.

The issue of access to subscription- based journals has been litigated ad nauseam and I do think global publishers have done by and large a decent job in terms of implementing with WHO and other agencies myriad access themes available to those countries too resource- constrained to afford regular subscriptions.[1]

Some authors disagree, insisting that only Open Access journals, a supposedly superior business model, can address the access problem adequately. And they are right, Open Access journals, by definition, pose no access problems of the kind subscription- based journals pose. Sadly, having your cake and eating it too rarely works in the real world, and so these authors, having resolved the access to academic research problem, are faced with a different problem they did not have before. Open Access journals can only survive as viable enterprises if a sufficiently high number of authors pay what are often expensive article processing charges, or APCs. These journals often offer their equivalent to the access schemes subscription- based journals have put in place, namely differential fees or fee waivers for those who absolutely cannot afford to pay.

Short of asking academics to exploit themselves by volunteering to produce and disseminate academic journals and their content, reliably, over decades, someone will have to pay for the resource intensive production of journals and to ensure the reliable availability of their content.

I have yet to see from those complaining about access problems realistic solutions to this challenge. They mostly, and typically correctly identify the problem, but beyond grandstanding they offer no answers. They expect someone else to sort things out for them.

As I said, authors in the global south can access bioethics journal content either by means of the access schemes mentioned earlier, or by simply emailing the authors of content they are interested in and by asking those authors for a complimentary electronic copy of their article. Nobody would decline such a request.

I do think that a much greater challenge is to enable scholars from the global south to participate in international conferences and workshops both to share their own knowledge, but also to learn from colleagues and to network with a view to establishing research partnerships and the like.

I suspect you will know Facebook. I posted a photo from a workshop I had organised in the summer of 2017 in the UK, on the most recent version of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences  (CIOMS) research ethics guidelines. Not unexpectedly a colleague, located in an upmarket London- based university, harangued me for the lack of diversity, perhaps most significantly, the evident lack of attendees from the global south. That colleague was right: only two of the 25 or so workshop delegates came from the Caribbean, while everyone else came from countries of the global north. Of course, I had virtually no funding to organise said workshop, and everyone who travelled there paid their own way. Nobody’s flight was covered by me. I did have inquiries from various colleagues in the global south who would have loved to attend, but quickly gave up on the idea due to lack of funds for their travel expenses. The colleague who criticized me quite publicly, naturally, had no funds to offer either. It is always easier to criticize than to contribute meaningfully to change. The same, as I tried to show, holds true for academics who refuse to acknowledge the cost involved in producing academic journals.

Some constructive attempts have been made to have a more globally representative group of conference goers presenting at and attending international bioethics events. A successful example of this is the Global Forum on Bioethics and Research. The GFBR has been around for a longish time. It’s funded mostly by the UK’s Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation, the US NIH Fogarty International Center and the UK’s Medical Research Council. I had a quick look at the GFBR’s website, with a view to finding out who governs it, and who decides on the composition of speakers and attendees of its meetings, given that its funders reside essentially in the USA and the UK. It seems to me as if the majority of those people are either staff members of these funding organisations, or are past/current grant recipients.[2] There appear to be very few truly independent scholars from the global south among those in charge of organising these global events.

I don’t think that this is the result of any kind of malicious intent. It’s likely a function of ‘who do we know who could serve on that steering committee who is from Africa, Asia etc’, and who does one know? Well, the answer is likely to be: ‘someone we have funded before’.

However, that alone does not address the question of whether or not the meetings are failures when it comes to the question of participants from the global south. Here are the criteria the GBFR uses to determine who among the applicants will be invited[3]:

·         Country of origin: GFBR would like to ensure a representative distribution of delegates from different regions;

·         Background /current area of expertise: GFBR is aimed at anyone involved or interested in health research ethics, including researchers, policy-makers and community representatives. GFBR seeks representation from many different disciplines;

·         Membership of an IRB/REC: Membership of an Institutional Review Board / Research Ethics Committee is not a prerequisite for attending GFBR, but may be taken into consideration;

·         Experience of ethics: GFBR encourage s a mixture of ‘old’ and ‘new’ faces at each forum so that participants can productively discuss issues of concern to them and gain from the perspectives of others. Applicants need not be experts in ethics;

·         Reasons for attending the meeting: GFBR seeks participants who will be able to actively contribute to the meeting and who expect to impact on research ethics and/or pursue a career in research ethics in their own country.

While there is the inevitable number of people who presumably just have to be at every such meeting (let’s call them ‘old’ faces), the GFBR has succeeded in terms of attracting a fairly wide range of delegates from the global south to its meetings over the last few years.  It’s a small (and expensive) meeting, designed to host about 80 delegates, but it’s probably a meeting as good as they come on the global bioethics scene. I truly wish there were more such events on the global bioethics events’ calendar.

It is fortuitous that the next World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics will be held in New Delhi from 4-7 December 2018 under the theme Health for all in an unequal world: obligations of global bioethics and is locally hosted by SAMA, the resource group for women’s health, the Forum for Medical Ethics Society, and, of course, the IAB.[4] With a bit of luck (and planning) there might be a plenary dedicated to figuring out how to enable more delegates from the global south to attend such events. Why don’t you propose to organise such a plenary to the India- based hosts of the event. They might consider it quite seriously.

---

[1]Schuklenk U. 2015. Fighting Imaginary Enemies in Bioethics Publishing. Bioethics 29(8): ii-iii. Schuklenk U, Magnus D. 2017. Justice and Bioethics: Who Should Finance Bioethics Publishing? AJOB 17(10): 1-2.

[2] http://www.gfbr.global/about-the-gfbr/ [Accessed 28 November 2017].

[3] http://www.gfbr.global/forum-meetings/ [Accessed 28 November 2017].

[4] http://www.iab2018.org [Accessed 28 November 2017]

Bioethicists taking on questionable publishers ... in ethics

Stefan Eriksson at Uppsala University and his colleague Gert Helgesson at the Karolinska Institute have undertaken the commendable job of creating two lists of English language bioethics journals, one featuring journals published by reputable publishers and another one featuring journals associated with other publishing outfits. Each of their critical choices is accompanied by links providing evidence in support of their concerns about the journals/publishers in question. It is doubtful that some of the questionable journals actually qualify as journals in any meaningful way. There is one such journal, for instance, that published a full one article in its three years of existence. The wonders of fee-for-upload open access publishing...

The list created by Ericsson and Helgesson should prove to be tremendously useful as a guide for junior faculty who wonder where to submit their first academic outputs for peer review, but it's also helpful to those of us who have been around for longer and are asked to provide sound publishing advice that goes beyond guessing the quality of particular journals.

Not unexpectedly, the list isn't quite complete, even as far as English language journals are concerned (e.g. the superb Indian Journal of Medical Ethics is missing in action), but it's a great start, and undoubtedly future iterations of the list will move closer to comprehensiveness. The list also does not aim to include journals other than English language journals. It's probably a fair enough approach as it would be a mammoth task indeed to check whether particular journal titles in other languages fall into one or the other category of publications.

Academics running OA journals - a new variety of academic self-exploitation?

An interesting phenomenon can currently be observed in the humanities - academics engaging in new forms of self-exploitation. It's linked to the OA hype gripping the academy. How does it work?

Well, in the old days for-profit publishers essentially took over the production and distribution of our peer reviewed content for us. We managed the academic side of the process (peer review etc), they managed the rest. They made (well, still make) a killing on our labour by virtue of being able to force university libraries to pay often exorbitant subscription fees so that we can access research that we produced in the first place.

Came OA, the idea that research paid for mostly by taxpayers should be made available free of charge to anyone anywhere. I call this the having-your-cake-and-eating-it model. Academics typically loves these sorts of models. Thing is, you can't actually have your cake and eat it. OA turned out to be - by and large - a model whereby costs were switched to the producers of the research. Academics suddenly had to pay huge amounts (typically these days about 3000  $ per pop) to be able to play (hence I coined these publishing models 'pay-to-play'). So, while in the not so great old days our libraries were bled dry by greedy publishers, under the new model the only academics capable of publishing their research outputs would be those with research funds able to cover those fees.

That can probably work for folks in the STEM subjects, but this can't work for humanities scholars. Most of us typically produce our research during term breaks, most of us don't sit on large quantities of research funding. In fact, most of us don't have research funding at all.

Here kicks the self-exploitation model in that I started of with. Some well-intentioned humanities scholars have since decided to set up their own OA journals, where neither readers pay, nor those who submit their content for review. Given that barriers to entry are fairly low these days (you need a webserver and publishing software), that is prima facie not a terrible idea. And yet, it does sound like yet another having-your-cake-and-eating-it model, doesn't it? It kind of is. Essentially, those who run those journals have embarked on a never-ending journey of self-exploitation. Nobody pays for anything, you volunteer your time (in return for your name on a journal website masthead), you rely probably to some extent on grad students and postdocs to keep your enterprise afloat, you divert research funding to keep the administrative side of your publishing operation ticking, universities provide the web-server, etc.

The reality here is that academics so volunteer to undertake the tasks publishers (be they OA or subscription based) typically undertake. Will these academics see a benefit from the institutions whose libraries would save large amounts of money if this model took hold (there would be no costs involved in subscribing to journals or in submitting content to them)? The long and short of it is that that is not the case. That funding will disappear elsewhere (a new soccer stadium anyone? new Principal's residence? ) So, really we see a case of academics exploiting themselves, no more, no less. They volunteer their time to undertake administrative (ie journal publishing) tasks that other professionals should undertake, and that these professionals should be paid to undertake, and that these professionals have been undertaken for a very long time.

Now, I'm the last to think that an argument from tradition is a good argument, but it is worth noting that the model whereby those who produce journals are paid for their labour has worked pretty well for us in the academy. You can have a legitimate argument about the cost side of things, about publishers' ever diminishing support services to academic journals, all of that, but fundamentally things work.  We get our content out in reputable academic journals, and the content is available ever more easily and at ever greater speed to other academics. On the other hand, the publishing landscape is littered with the corpses of journals that relied on volunteers to keep all aspects of their operations alive because they insisted on being 'free'. The truth is though, well-paid academics spend their time undertaking administrative tasks involved in producing these journals when they could be doing actual research, teach, or provide other services to their employers, ie the universities where they work.

There was a time when I was worried about what would happen to the published peer reviewed content after the failure of these kinds of publications. Would they also disappear into the rubbish bins of the internet? Thankfully that doesn't have to be the case. We have today numerous repositories where such outlets can store their articles after their demise. So, as long as that occurs, at least the content can survive the demise of the journals themselves.

Still, if I was a budding academic thinking about where to place my first or second peer reviewed journal article, would these kinds of journals be my first choice? Probably not.

On peer review

The debates among journal editors and other academics about the merits or otherwise of particular forms of peer review continue. A growing number of academics in the STEM subjects seem to think that post-publication peer review provides for higher quality control than the traditional post-submission pre-publication review. Their logic is that mistakes in manuscripts are less likely to be found during a process involving only a handful of reviewers. They furthermore argue that post-publication peer review will submit journal articles to scrutiny by a much larger number of readers. Methodological, statistical and other mistakes would almost certainly be found out in post-publication scrutiny with a higher likelihood simply due to the much larger number of expert reviewing (ie reading, analysing and commenting on) manuscripts post publication. It is difficult to argue with this contention, except to note that post publication peer review sites today suggest that only some of the manuscripts there receive such desirable academic community review. What does this proposal mean then for papers that are ignored altogether by peers. Will they still count as some kind of peer reviewed publications or are they just blog-equivalents? Who counts as a reviewer? Would the authors’ best friends be viable options? University administrators and appointments committees will want to know.

Of course, traditional peer review doesn’t preclude post-publication review. It happens that manuscripts that passed pre-publication review are eventually found to be seriously methodologically flawed. Many of those are withdrawn, but reluctant publishers and editors have also gained notoriety by leaving flawed manuscripts in the public domain without errata. Post-publication review depends to some extent on easy access to the manuscripts in question (Open Access being a bonus here), as well as the existence of sophisticated web-based moderated platforms permitting reader-peers to leave comments. It goes without saying that relentlessly profit-driven publishers of academic journals will be reluctant to invest in the staff necessary to manage this process.

I think, for humanities manuscripts, for the time being, pre-publication anonymous peer review remains the way to go. Anonymous peer review guarantees honest reviews from reviewers. Open review, whereby the reviewers and authors are disclosed to each other, will often prevent honest reviews, simply because reviewers inclined to be critical of a particular submission will be reluctant to burn their bridges by speaking frankly to the quality of a particular submission submitted by a close colleague or friend. Anonymous reviews are not in their own right a guarantee of quality. That’s where journal editors step in. They need to evaluate reviewers’ comments and decide what to do if reviewers’ verdicts vary significantly. You might be surprised to learn that this does not happen all that frequently. Reviewers almost always reach similar verdicts.

The challenge today is, of course, to find knowledgeable reviewers. I have lamented this problem here before. Senior colleagues are often reluctant to undertake this vital work. In fact, a few of them refuse to undertake reviews outright. That does not stop them from complaining bitterly if their manuscripts are, in their view, in the review process for an extraordinary amount of time. Perhaps we ought to institute a policy whereby as editors we would be well within our right to refuse to evaluate submissions from colleagues routinely unwilling to accept review requests.

Another issue arises when it comes to sourcing true peers to review particular content. Having now been an Editor of this journal and its companion journal for the last 15 years, I still struggle on occasion to find a suitable competent reviewer for a particular manuscript. It takes time, especially if the subject matter of a particular manuscript is highly specialised, to find the right peer reviewer. At this journal as well as its companion journal our standard operating procedure is that we as Editors have to find appropriate reviewers. We ask authors only in the rarest of exceptions to suggest possible reviewers to us. It turns out that choosing our own reviewers is a good idea, more so than we thought it is. Journals who ask authors for reviewer suggestions have been hit in fairly significant numbers by fake reviews, written under pseudonym by submitting authors, or by commercial outfits in the business of drafting fake reviews.[i] Post publication peer review publications should take note. You never stop learning when it comes to these matters, and sadly, nothing much surprises me any longer. The public or perish culture in today’s universities has clearly led to unreasonably pressures on academics, leading quite a few of us to stray from the right path.

Courtesy of the rise of open access on-line ‘journals’ we have reason to be weary of claims that the papers published in many such venues have been peer reviewed. As I write this, several incidents were reported where bogus papers have been accepted for publication by such outlets, for a processing fee, of course, delivered to the ‘editor’ via PayPal. Bound to be a classic is undoubtedly this one: The authors conjured up a fake paper with the title ‘Get me off your fucking mailing list’, directed at a SPAM Open Access outlet inviting contributions. Their paper was accepted, ostensibly after peer review.[ii] As any academic with a university affiliation will be able to testify to these days, the same outfits don’t discriminate as editors of more discerning journals would, in terms of competence to review particular academic outputs. A journalist employed at an Ottawa based newspaper reports that his submission of a fake article to a dodgy Open Access outfit ended up with him being now inundated with requests to review manuscripts he is utterly unqualified to review for said ‘publisher’.[iii] It is fair to say that on the odd occasion every editor will call on the wrong reviewer for a particular submission, but that is usually caught by the second or third reviewer, usually the invited reviewer declines. Apparently many pay-for-play Open Access publishing operations are primarily concerned about extracting author processing fees out of the submitting authors. That they can only achieve after they accept submitted content.

An issue remains apparently the Conflict of Interest declaration. There are all sorts of standards deployed by all sorts of publishing outfits, grant giving bodies and so on. Let me just say that I think reviewers would be well advised to err on the side of caution when they declare conflicts of interest. One good yardstick would be to ask yourself whether, if you were at the receiving end of your review, you would want to be advised (as an editor) of particular information that you are considering disclosing. Conflicts of interest could include knowledge of the authors’ identity, financial conflicts, but also that you might be an author harshly criticised or praised in the manuscript that you are reviewing. None of this would disqualify you per se from reviewing, but knowing about these potential conflicts would help editors to assess your comments more competently.

It is pretty obvious to anyone who has been in the business of publishing as an author or editor – or both – that anonymous peer review is far from perfect, and it is conceivable that new publishing platforms will eventually lead to the rise of better peer review processes. I for one am looking forward to those.

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[i] Ferguson, C. 2014. It’s happened again: Journal cannot rule out possibility that author did his own peer review. Retraction Watch November 10. http://retractionwatch.com/2014/11/10/it-happened-again-journal-cannot-rule-out-possibility-author-did-his-own-peer-review/ [accessed November 25, 2014]

[ii] Bealls, J. 2014. Bogus Journal Accepts Profanity-Laced Anti-Spam Paper Scholarly Open Access November 20. http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/20/bogus-journal-accepts-profanity-laced-anti-spam-paper/ [accessed November 25, 2014]

[iii] Spears, Tom. 2014. How my fake science paper earned me a shot at an editor's job.  Ottawa Citizen. November 25. http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ok-no-problem-fakery-is-fine-at-bottom-feeding-journal [accessed November 25, 2014]

Scientific research is in a serious crisis

This weekend's column from the Kingston Whig-Standard.

A short while ago I wrote a column attacking homeopathy and other pseudo-scientific solutions to serious health problems. Not unexpectedly my Twitter feed gathered followers among friends of homeopathy, slamming me variously for not reporting the amazing scientific research supporting the use of homeopathy as well as for reporting uncritically mainstream science’s take on the issue.

Well, as to the former, there is zero evidence that I am aware of, to date, that homeopathic concoctions work. There is no homeopathic ‘remedy’ that will protect you against the flu, for instance.

As to the second point though, while there is no alternative to scientific research, not all is well in the scientific research enterprise either. And it’s not, as the friends of homeopathy would have us believe, one big conspiracy instigated by nasty pharmaceutical multinationals. It turns out, there is a lot of scientific evidence — how ironic — accumulating that things are going pretty badly wrong due to the way scientific excellence is measured today by folks in the business of ranking university excellence, as well as research funders, governments and sadly many administrators in the academy.

Scientific knowledge relies fundamentally on evidence that can be replicated. Say, I undertake a clinical study with a particular experimental agent and it turns out that this agent works — by some standard — better than an alternative drug given to trial participants, my trial could eventually provide sufficient evidence for the experimental agents to become an approved drug.

Of course, much relies on my trial having been methodologically sound, my statistical analysis of the results having been correct and so on and so forth. Typically I will publish my results in a scientific journal where my data and analysis are scrutinized by specialist peer reviewers. These reviewers are tasked by the journal’s editors with checking that my trial was ethical, that it was methodologically sound, and that my conclusions are actually supported by my data. Of course, even the best reviewers make mistakes, they might not have the competencies to evaluate the relevant stuff and so bad science slips through and gets published.

Sadly we have plenty of evidence for the failure of large numbers of peer reviewers to pick even the most basic errors in scientific manuscripts. This might have to do with the fact that they are typically expected to volunteer their time and that their university employers usually don’t give them credit for this sort of work. In fact, as a journal editor, I can tell you that frequently the most seasoned academics refuse to undertake these vital reviews because that work doesn’t add to their CV, peer recognition, name it.

Well, the error control mechanism that science is based on is that someone will try to replicate scientific studies and then the erroneous research studies will come to light. It really is trial and error. That’s the theory. The practice is that very many, if not most, scientific studies are not replicated. The reason for this is that there is little incentive by research funders to do so. The buzz word is ‘innovation.’ Oh yes, the academy has not remained above the vacuous babble of modern management talk. We all want to be ‘excellent,’ ‘innovative’ and ‘path-breaking’ at pretty much everything that we do.

In fact, our research funders expect no less of us. You are not innovative if you simply check whether someone else has done a proper job. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize how foolhardy such funding policies are. Some efforts at replicating so-called landmark studies have been made. The British magazine The Economist reports that only six of 53 landmark studies in cancer research could be replicated. Another group reported that it managed to replicate only about 25% of 67 similarly important studies.

The good news is that this has been done at all. The bad news is that this isn’t standard fare in the sciences, biomedical or other. Verification of other scientists’ research just isn’t a good career move in a research enterprise that doesn’t value such vital work.

Another problem is that scientists are demonstrably reluctant to tell us if their experiment failed. The reason could be that a commercial sponsor doesn’t want the world to find out too quickly that one of the ‘promising’ drugs in its pipeline is actually a fluke. Commercial confidentiality agreements stand in the way of serving the public interest. Shareholder interests typically trump the public good, and scientific researchers more often than not collude. The likely outcome of this situation is that at some point someone else will test the same component again. Time and resources are therefore wasted. So-called negative results currently are featured in only about 14% of published scientific publications. Of course, in reality the odds are that very many more research studies fail. Scientific progress, to a large extent, depends on failure.

Alas our current systems don’t reward the reporting of failure. Academic journals have their quality measured by a foolish tool, devised in Canada, called Impact Factor. Basically this tool measures how frequently articles published in a journal are cited over a two-year period. Obviously, you won’t be able to become a high-impact journal with papers that report failed studies. People rarely cite such results. Accordingly many researchers don’t even submit such important study outcomes. Don’t we all just love success? Have you ever seen a university marketing department celebrating a researcher’s failure? Me neither. It’s not how we roll in the academy. To be fair to the marketing folks, not many media outlets would report Professor C. Ancer’s failure to replicate a landmark, breakthrough cancer study, despite the fact that the much-reported landmark study has so been shown to be of questionable quality, if not outright flawed.

Some efforts are currently under way to register all trials and to ensure that outcomes are reported, if not in scientific journal then in some other forum that’s easily accessible. The same holds true for the raw data gathered in a trial. Still, progress on this front is far from satisfactory.

New commercial publishing models in the academy further aggravate some of the problems just described. A new business model called Open Access relies overwhelmingly on authors (as opposed to subscribing university libraries) paying for the publication of their work. The journals’ commercial success depends on uploading as many academic outputs to their webservers as possible. The more they publish, the higher their profit. Recently a science journalist submitted an error-ridden manuscript to 304 such Open Access journals. A total of 157 accepted it happily for publication, subject to the article upload fee I mentioned earlier. From there said paper would have gone straight into relevant biomedical databases as a peer reviewed paper. On the face of it, a sound scientific publication.

Sadly, due to the publish-or-perish mentality that isn’t a myth in the academy, quite a significant number of academic researchers engage in academic misconduct in some form or shape. One recent survey reports that about 28% of scientists know of researchers who engage in scientific misconduct in the research they undertake. It is not clear whether all of that misconduct necessarily translates into fraud or useless research outputs, but a significant amount of it almost certainly does.

I could go on in this vein for quite a while because there is plenty of dirt to be found where there is scientific research. It is high time universities and researcher funders have a serious look at the kinds of systems they have created to measure and incentivize research activities. It does appear to be the case that what is in place currently incentivizes unethical conduct to a significant extent. That must change.

And yet, keeping Winston Churchill’s dictum in mind that ‘democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,’ much the same can be said for scientific research. It is the best we’ve got, but that shouldn’t stop us from fixing the problems we are aware of.

Udo Schuklenk holds the Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics at Queen’s University, he is a Joint Editor-in-Chief of Bioethics the official publication of the International Association of Bioethics, he tweets @schuklenk

Long live the Open Access Movement ... Not!

And here we go again, true story, I received this email today from an Open Access 'publisher'. Obviously I am not qualified to assess this manuscript, yet the administrators of this publisher see fit to invite me to review a manuscript that clearly I am not qualified to review. As far as email mass mailings are concerned, this crap shoot takes the crown. I hope you appreciate the 'journal' title, 'Science Journal of Medicine and Clinical Trial'. You could not make it up. The worst thing is that academics in a number of countries are forced by government edict to submit to Open Access 'publishers'. Quality requirements: zero, as long as it is Open Access. So, please do submit to 'Science Journal of Medicine & Clinical Trial' to get your governmental brownie points. Academic freedom be damned. Make sure to swipe your credit card though, otherwise 'Science Journal of Medicine and Clinical Trials' and its infinite number of sister publications won't be interested in your output any longer.

Dear Colleagues

How are you? I am sure you are busy with many activities right now. However, I hope you could help us review a manuscript, entitled"Quantiferonassay versus tuberculin skin test in detection of latent TB in hemodialysis patients" that has been submitted for publication in SCIENCE JOURNAL OF MEDICINE & CLINICAL TRIAL if you are able to take on this task as well as whether you can return the Review Form by 15TH May, 2013 or earlier.

The Manuscript, Reviewer's Guide and Author Guidelines will be E-mail to you if you are interested.

In particular, please make sure that the paper addresses issues of value to our broad-based audience, and that it cuts through the thick layers of theory and verbosity for them and makes sense of it all in a clean, cohesive manner.

On behalf of the Editorial Team of the Science Journal Publication, I thank you very much in advance for your effort in this endeavor.

ABSTRACT:
Background:Patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection pose a high risk of developing active TB disease. It is therefore important to detect latent TB infection (LTBI) to be able to offer treatment and prevent progression to TB disease.
Objective: to compare the performance of Quantiferon-TB Gold test (QFT-G)in the diagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection with tuberculin skin test (TST) among patients undergoing hemodialysis.
Patients and methods: sixty patients undergoing hemodialysis at Al-Azhar and Assiut university hospitals were subjected to TSTand QFT-G. Theagreement between both tests was evaluated with respect to age, sex, BCG vaccinationand history of contact to a known TB case.
Results: The percentage of positive TST results (induration cut off 10 mm) and positive QFT-G test results was found to be 45% & 31.7% respectively. The overall agreement between the QFT-G and the TST in hemodialysis patients was 44/60 (73.3%) and it was found to be statistically significant (P=0.001). BCG vaccination had no effect on either TST or QFT- G results in hemodialysis patients. Positive TST and QFT-G results were found to be 90% and 100 % respectively in hemodialysis patients with history of contact to known TB cases. Both QFT-G and TST results were not significantly related to age or sex. In conclusions, Both QFT-G and TST may be complementary to each other in the diagnosis of latent tuberculous infection in hemodialysis patients.

and a late comer to the Open Access Party ... the New York Times

Just about every outlet in the universe has written about the pitfalls of Open Access digital only 'academic publishing'. Today the New York Times joined the party. It's not a bad piece actually, written by veteran health reporter Gina Kolata. Check it out when you have a minute! It's centered around Beall's list of predatory on-line 'publishers'. What's lacking are reasonable explanations of what made this fiasco possible. Low barriers to market entry anyone?

Meanwhile ever more research funders are rushing headlong into forcing researchers they fund to publish their content in open access outlets. All of this, of course, is giving rise to ever more dodgy 'publishers' opening up their business, aka uploading submitted content to their webserver for a steep fee. Worse, upcoming research assessment exercises force academics in some places to publish their research outputs in open access outfits without providing funding for the uploading activity (aka open access publishing). You better forget about the idea of having reliable publishing histories attached to academic content. Courtesy of Open Access the powers that are have fully embraced a wild west version of what was once known as academic publishing. It'll no doubt come to bite them in their backside, but I suspect those responsible will long have left when the consequences of these ill-considered policies hit the proverbial fan.

The Dangers of Open Access Online Only

I know that I sound a bit like a broken record when I continue to go on and on and on about the problems associated with the current Open Access frenzy. The problems are all too obvious. For starters: low barriers to entry are an invite to fly-by-night operators. These days it is fair to say that dodgy Open Access outfits outnumber by far the very few decent Open Access publishers. Open Access as it is currently conceived constitutes also a direct threat to the ability of academics to publish their work in professional journals. If Open Access replaces subscription based models, an author's ability to pay the Open Access fees determines whether an academic is able to afford publishing her work. The fees in question range anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per article. To be fair, a VERY limited number of universities has begun shelling out $$ for Open Access fees for their academic researchers. Say, if you were an academic working in one of those exceptional institutions and you decided to publish in an Open Access outlet you'd go to your university's research office or its library and ask that it transfer the cash required for getting your article published to the Open Access publisher. The more you publish the more expensive you become to your cash strapped employer. No doubt some such institutions will begin to love the old days again when academics didn't publish that much, simply because that would be cheaper. Or there might be a $$ limit on the number of papers you may publish, you might also find yourself suddenly strongly encouraged by the powers that are in your university to publish where it is cheapest. - Talking about cheaper, the true free riders in this system would, of course, be institutions the academics of which publish preciously little (think Phoenix and similar outfits). They're the true beneficiaries of OA. It is noteworthy though, that free riding is encouraged in this system. Whoever produces research pays for the luxury of seeing it published. Anyone else is in for a free ride. Yep, that is Open Access justice. - Most institutions, of course, have neither the money nor the inclination to spend $$ on the article processing fee the Open Access business model depends on. Hence the threat to academic researchers' ability to publish their academic content in an Open Access world.

Still, this is all old news, except, of course, to the having-your-cake-and-eating-it Open Access proponents. What is news is that one of my dire predictions has since come to pass. I warned on various occasions that these fly-by-night operators have no back-up systems in place for the point in time where they switch off their little web-servers and shut down their operations. Articles 'published' on their servers, I warned, would disappear into the internet's never-never-land. This danger is one reason for why I am such a Luddite with regard to the need for print versions of published peer reviewed content. It is the only guarantee that we have that  peer reviewed content can be easily traced via university libraries. It is the only watertight guarantee we have, in so far as protecting the integrity of the published academic outputs are concerned. If there's no print copy, we might sometimes be able to find individual article pdf's of authors who published on Open Access platforms that vanished over night, but there is no guarantee. This has all sorts of undesirable consequences for articles that have been cited (say by a doctoral student in her research thesis - how could a reviewer tasked with evaluating said thesis do that job if some of her cited articles don't exist any longer due to the collapse of the Open Access outfit that published them?)

Well, here's a link to a bona fide report about such an Open Access fly-by-night outfit having closed operations, with the complete loss of all its published contents. The virtual journals gone, it is not only the loss of articles published there that is of concern, it also means that crucial information about the journal is gone, too. Did it undertake peer review? Was there an editorial board? -

And yes, I told you so... -  QED as they say.

Open Access a threat to academic freedom?

It is no secret to people following my academic writings or this blog for that matter: I am no great fan of Open Access. Its low barriers to market entry have led to a proliferation of dodgy OA outfits that by now easily outnumber the decent OA publishers, and there is no end in sight.  Beall's List of Predatory Publishers flags the magnitude of the problem at hand. Budding academics and those not quite competitive enough to actually get published in decent journals fall prey to their money making schemes in breathtaking numbers. There's more to be said about the business as well as academic flaws of current OA business models, but that isn't the topic of this blog entry.

Recently humanities scholars have woken up to the threat that OA causes to their academic freedom to publish, or so they claim. At the heart of their complaint is this: A whole bunch of research funders insist that the research they fund must be published in an OA journal. Several problems with this: It is probably fair to say that there are only a handful - if that many - decent OA humanities journals out there, and they likely are not in medieval history. If scholars in those disciplines whose work is publicly funded were forced to publish in whatever OA 'journal' (aka webserver) exists in their discipline they would effectively be forced to publish in a location where - really - they would not want to be seen dead. Subscription based journals - often needed to fund academic society activities, something conveniently forgotten in the rush to the economic bottom pit that is OA - would see their submission base diminished as funded academics would no longer be able to choose them as their preferred outlets.

Truth be told, most humanities published research these days isn't funded research to begin with. This is the reason why OA hasn't taken off in our neck of the woods. However, many of us are working in public universities, our salaries are fully or partially funded by taxpayer $$. Forcing us to submit to OA outlets the moment we get our hands on the meagre research funds that are out there for us, would have detrimental consequences for our ability to communicate our findings to colleagues, because they would have to look for our work in the dodgiest of places. It would likely have a deleterious effect on the places (specialist journals with often low circulation) where we discuss and advance our research. It would also likely destroy the viability of some academic societies. Subscription based journal publisher now frequently offer OA options, proposing fairly high fees (>3000$ isn't unusual) to those with spare cash. I must say that I like this idea a lot, because it keeps established loci of academic conversations alive and kicking. I am not so sure what this means in the long-term for the viability of their subscription business model though. Say, if you would make 50% of content in a given volume OA, why should any librarian continue paying the full subscription fee for a journal that's available half-way to anyone who isn't a subscriber. There are undoubtedly challenges ahead, suffice it to say though that I like these latter developments both as an author as an editor.

Some universities have begun to offer funding to humanities researchers who have no external research funding but want to submit to OA publications. Obviously this is only sustainable if dramatic cut-backs at the subscription journals front happen, or if you work for a bank (Harvard, Princeton, Oxbride, etc). Humanities scholars are well-advised to monitor carefully what's happening in their research publishing domains as governments and research funders have decided to revolutionise the way we communicate our research fundings to each other, whether we like it or not. I do think there's a potential threat to our academic freedom to publish in a location of our choosing, but it doesn't seem to be as dramatic as some academics make it to be. After all, there ARE other ways to communicate your work to the world and your colleagues, for instance via social networking, blogging, repositories such as SSRN, academia.edu, university based OA repositories and so on and so forth. Of course, should you need an actual academic job, you'll find that these sorts of outlets are not going to get you one... Incidentally, at least for the humanities this is true also for pretty much any OA (online only) publication you chose to go for.

Post scriptum: As an aside, it seems university libraries have been at the forefront of pushing for OA. Makes one wonder, in time of diminishing library funds, whether that's a classic example of having your cake and eating it. Be that as it may, it turns out, the same libraries have also been busy robbing students of their copyright to their own research theses stored on library servers. Remakable times!

The Open Access industry - basement based academic 'journals' in action

and here, an invitation I (a bioethicist/philosopher) received to review a manuscript. Do note the title of the journal (not my field) and the title of the article they need reviewed (has nothing to do with either my field or the journal).

moronia in academia...

International Journal of Peace and Development Studies

www.academicjournals.org/IJPDS

  

Dear Colleague,

We received a manuscript titled "

CRISIS IN THEORETICAL PHYSICS:

THE PROBLEM OF SCIENTIFIC TRUTH

" I wish to inquire if you can create time to review this manuscript.  We will be most grateful if the manuscript can be reviewed and sent to us within 2 weeks.

Please find the abstract below:

 Abstract: The problem of truth in science - the most urgent problem of our time -   is discussed. The correct theoretical analysis of the generally accepted foundations of theoretical physics  is proposed. The principle of the unity of formal logic and rational dialectics is a methodological basis of the analysis. The main result is as follows: the foundations (i.e. classical thermodynamics, the special theory of relativity, quantum mechanics) contain logical errors The existence of logical errors is irrefutable proof of incorrectness of the theoretical foundations and means that theoretical physics enters the greatest crisis. The crisis in physics leads inevitably to the general crisis in science. The crisis as effect is explained by existence of the global cause: the crisis is a collateral and inevitable result of inductive method of knowledge of the Nature.

I am looking forward to your response and will be grateful to hear from you.

Kindly acknowledge the receipt of this mail

Best Regards,

Emekagbor Richard,

Editorial Assistant,

International Journal of Peace and Development Studies (IJPDS).