I proposed that since this is intended to transform the process  of scientific publishing that we should put together a council of scientists (or academics more broadly) to collectively make decisions that would be best for science. In response Fox and Petchey suggest that

The decision makers are the journal owners; they’re the ones who already control all other aspects of the operation of their journals, including editorial policy and pricing.

It was upon reading this sentence that it finally clicked for me why I think that the PubCred proposal is in fact inherently bad for the scientific process. It codifies the idea that for-profit journals have a right to have the majority of their labor done for free.

In order to understand the validity if this point I need to present a brief version of a post that I keep meaning to write titled “There’s no such thing as a free lunch; unless of course you’re a for-profit scientific journal.”

Scientific journals originally started out as a central location for scientists to share ideas with one another, replacing the practice of sharing ideas via personal letters between individuals. For most of their history, scientific journals persisted as collective efforts intended to identify good science, improve it and distribute it as broadly as possible. Journals were typically run by scientific societies and were effectively non-profit in nature³. In this context it made perfect sense for academics to donate their time to journals as reviewers and editors because the ultimate goal of the journals was to benefit science by maximizing the quality of science and the extent of it’s distribution.

In recent years the prevalence of for-profit journals has increased dramatically, and even many society journals are increasingly being managed by the big for-profit publishing companies. I have absolutely no objection this. I think that scientific publishing has benefited substantially from the infusion of ideas and resources provided by the market⁴. However, the fact that a for-profit company still gets most of its work done by volunteers seems a little strange, and it becomes a little absurd when you realize that they people who are doing all of the work for free are then the ones paying for the product. Since the for-profit journals need to make a profit and are motivated to maximize profit rather than breadth of distribution, this makes for-profit journals substantially more expensive (e.g., Ecology costs a library just over $2/article whereas Oecologia costs over $20/article⁵), and therefore reduces the availability of science as the cost of journals increases (and library budgets stay the same or go down). Again, I don’t object to for-profit journals, but I do object to the idea that I am somehow morally obligated to work for free so that a corporation can make a profit⁶.

And this is exactly what PubCred does. It codifies the idea that it is my responsibility to work, for free, for a for-profit corporation⁷. It obligates me to donate time to a group whose goal is to maximize profits, not to maximize the distribution of scientific results. And this seems to me to be a really bad idea. The fact that we as scientists drive the peer review process is one of the last controls we have over the distribution of scientific results, and I for one am not ready to simply hand that over to the journal owners as suggested by Fox and Petchey. In contrast, a monetarily based system allows the market to actually work. If I want to donate my time and effort to a non-profit journal, in the same way that I donate time and money to charities, then I can. If a for-profit corporation wants me to work for them in order to generate profit, then they can actually pay me.

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¹You can’t allow separate accounts that aren’t linked to one another via a unique author ID if you’re going to allow for accounts to carry small negative balances. Otherwise it’s easy to cheat by opening up multiple accounts.

²I’m going to skip over this one for the time being since I think my answer to points 1 and 3 pretty much puts me firmly against the currently proposed system, but I might come back in a separate post and address some of the arguments made by Fox and Petchey that I find less than convincing.

³There are of course exceptions. Nature being notable among these.

⁴The single best example of this that I can think of is the substantial increase in the speed of review and publication among ecology journals that I think is largely attributable to the creation of Ecology Letters.

⁵http://www.journalprices.com/

⁶This issue of for-profit journals charging high prices to the same individuals who are doing their labor for them for free is a serious issue regardless of Pubcred. At some point I’ll try to write a broader post on this point with more links to relevant content.

⁷Which is why I’m completely surprised by comments such as these that indicate that the for-profit journals aren’t jumping all over this idea, but I guess that this is probably just an indication of how entitled they feel to their free labor.

First, thanks to Ethan for a very thoughtful post on Pub Creds. This kind of constructive criticism is actually more welcome and valuable than unreserved praise. Thanks also to Ethan for inviting Owen and I to respond. Owen and I have chatted about our response, and I’ve taken the lead on actually writing it.

In his post, Ethan raised two major concerns about Pub Creds, who makes the rules, and how to uniquely identify authors and reviewers. These concerns motivated Ethan to suggest what he argues is a simpler and more flexible system, based on real money rather than Pub Creds. I’ll first address both of Ethan’s concerns, thereby alleviating the felt need to consider a real money system. I’ll then raise some concerns about an alternative system based on real money. At the end I’ll address some minor points Ethan raised in passing.

The issue of who makes the rules, while undoubtedly challenging, doesn’t need to be as challenging as Ethan suggests. I certainly don’t think we need to elect representatives who will meet in some kind of Pub Cred Constitutional Convention. The decision makers are the journal owners; they’re the ones who already control all other aspects of the operation of their journals, including editorial policy and pricing. For the ESA’s journals, the starting point for this kind of discussion is the Publications Committee, which makes recommendations to the Governing Board. (Indeed, the ESA Publications Committee will be discussing Pub Creds this week, at the suggestion of Ecological Monographs EiC Aaron Ellison). Similarly, the BES has a Publications Committee, as do most other scientific societies that sponsor journals. So while there’s undoubtedly a collective action problem here, it’s not the problem of getting thousands of individual scientists to act collectively, it’s a problem of getting a much smaller number of journal owners to act collectively. I would make the analogy to the Dryad data-sharing and archiving system that a number of scientific societies have just agreed to support—we didn’t need to have a “constitutional convention” to make that happen. If and when one or more leading journal owners decide that they want to seriously pursue Pub Creds, I imagine that they would charge their existing Publications Committee, or else a new ad hoc committee, to liase with other journal owners and build up a consensus among them as to how to proceed. That’s basically what happened with Dryad, as I understand it. This seems to me both a practical and appropriate way to proceed.

The technical issue of uniquely identifying authors and reviewers is one that’s been raised to Owen and I a few times. It never even occurred to us that this might be an issue, which is why it’s not mentioned in our paper. Indeed, it was such a non-issue for me that, when it was first raised, I continued to feel it was a non-issue but had trouble articulating why! Then yesterday Owen put his finger on it: it’s bank accounts that need unique identifiers, not people. This is true in the real-money banking system, and it’s true of the Pub Cred Bank as well. For instance, the Pub Cred Bank might work as follows:

1) Authors sign up for an account at the Pub Cred Bank, and receive a unique account number.
2) In order to submit an article, the submitting person must enter the Pub Cred Bank account number of all authors. At the same time, the submitting person indicates which authors will bear the cost of submission, including who will bear the cost of handling, and the reviews.
3) This information is passed to the Pub Cred Bank, which then emails all authors, and also requires that authors whose account will be debited click on a link to authorise this debit. One the PubCred Bank has sufficient authorisation for debits, a communication is sent to the journal submission web site and the ms submission is completed.
4) If the ms is rejected without review, Pub Creds are debited for handling. If it is reviewed, Pub Creds are debited according to the distribution of debits already authorised.
5) Reviewers will also need a Pub Cred account. Their unique account number will be submitted with reviews. If the handling editor agrees that the review is useful, they authorise credit to the reviewers account.
6)In fact, it’s not even a problem if individuals have multiple accounts at the Pub Cred Bank. After all, lots of people have multiple real-money accounts (checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards…) which they use to take in and pay out funds. Authors with multiple accounts would simply need to specify which of their accounts they wish to use to pay for a particular submission, and reviewers with multiple accounts would simply need to specify which of their accounts they wanted their Pub Creds deposited into.

Obviously, we’re skimming over security and other operational issues here, but surely those are soluble, “engineering”-type issues that don’t impact the worthiness (or otherwise) of the Pub Cred proposal itself.

I hope I’ve addressed Ethan’s major concerns about Pub Creds. So now I get to turn the tables and raise some concerns about his proposed “real money” alternative.  In this alternative system, authors pay a fee to submit, which is used to pay referees, and journals might be free to compete by setting their own prices for reviews and submissions. This idea has been proposed by various people in various versions. I first heard about it a few years ago when I was told that it had been proposed by Everett Fee at Limnology and Oceanography. I actually thought it was a great idea when I first heard it, and pitched it informally to the senior editors at Ecology Letters and Am Nat. The feedback I got was largely negative, and upon reflection both Owen and I agree that it’s not the way to go. The major concerns, in no particular order:

1. We respectfully disagree that currency exchange issues are inconsequential. If they are inconsequential, we assume Ethan would have no objection to using some currency other than USD as the standard in which submissions and reviews are priced? Owen says that if it’s all the same to Ethan, he’d prefer to price everything in pounds sterling. We also assume Ethan wouldn’t mind if the USD depreciates against the chosen Pub Cred currency, thereby increasing the real cost of his submissions? And that he wouldn’t mind paying transaction fees associated with currency conversions and transfers?

2. As Ethan notes, everyone starts off broke in Pub Cred land; the only way to earn Pub Creds is to do reviews. The same is emphatically NOT true of real money. Many authors have no research grants. While it’s true that these authors theoretically could pay for their submissions by doing a proportionate amount of reviewing, there’s no way to have a real-money overdraft system to cut some slack to authors who haven’t been asked to review in a while, or at all. And while forgoing page charges on one paper/year for authors who lack funds is one thing (many journals do), forgoing submission charges while still continuing to pay referees is a financial risk no journal would want to take, even for a limited number of submissions/author/year. Plus, here’s the flip side: if you have a grant, or are simply willing to spend some personal funds, you can buy your way out of having to review. Do we want a system where those of us who have grants and/or sufficiently large salaries can afford not to have to review, while those of us who don’t have grants are desperate to review because otherwise we can’t afford to submit anything?

3. One side effect of point #2 is that it isn’t true that all that matters is the ratio of submission costs to reviewer fees (i.e. that their absolute values don’t matter). For instance, someone who has a grant to pay part or all of their submission costs is going to need to be offered exorbitant amounts to be enticed to review. This isn’t just speculation on my part: I’ve had more than one person tell me that they’d need to be hundreds or even >$1000 USD to agree to do a review they otherwise wouldn’t do.

4. Many authors are going to be very reluctant to pay even a modest real money fee in order to submit a paper that could well be rejected, even if the paper is substantive and well-matched to the journal. That’s just the way it is, but that reluctance also has some rational foundation. Since even rejection without review costs the author a bit of money, but costs the journal little or nothing, journals will have a financial incentive to reject papers without review and pocket the portion of the submission fee that pays for this decision (and if you forbid journals from charging anything for rejection without review, you can’t afford to pay editors, and you’ve removed much of the incentive for authors to submit their papers to appropriate journals).

5. If real money is involved, publishers will see it as a revenue stream. Indeed, in conversations with a staff member at Wiley-Blackwell, it was made clear to Owen and I that publishers are going to want to know not just how to break even on the Pub Cred system, but how to make money off it. And Pub Creds doesn’t even involve real money! In a real money sytem, publishers WILL want their cut of submission fees. After all, they have to pay financial administration staff, there are overhead costs, they have shareholders to feed…This issue is actually the single biggest obstacle to implementing Pub Creds in practice. Making it a real money system just makes this hurdle a hundred times taller.

6. Is it REALLY a good idea to let journals compete on prices for reviews and submission fees in a real money system? Remember that everyone is not broke in “real money land”. The mind boggles at what publishers might try, and what effects it might have…

7. For the reasons outlined above, and just because real money is a really serious thing, I predict that it would be far harder to get a significant number of journals to agree to a real money system than to Pub Creds.

That’s as much as Owen and I had to say on the big issues Ethan raised. In response to some of Ethan’s minor comments:

Ethan indicated his impression that journals are asking for multiple rounds of review, which would indeed be a bad thing for all the reasons Ethan lists. But as editors, authors, and reviewers ourselves, Owen and I haven’t noticed this. In my experience it’s a very rare practice, especially since journals compete to have short times-to-decision. This leads many mss to be rejected without review, or else rejected for trivial reasons after one round of review, forcing what’s really a revision to be resubmitted as a new ms.

As to whether journals should be given flexibility with regard to credits or payments under the PubCred system, I don’t think so (with one specific exception to be noted). If flexibility were allowed, the system would immediately break down because journals would start offering reviewers large amounts of Pub Creds while charging authors few or no Pub Creds (or even paying authors to submit!) If allowing journals to compete on “price” for submissions and reviews really is a good idea (and I don’t think it is), it needs to be with real money. The only pricing flexibility that could be possibly be allowed under the Pub Cred system would be if journals wanted to charge X Pub Creds for a submission, in order to pay X-1 reviewers plus the editor (e.g., Science or Nature could charge 6 Pub Creds in order to pay for 5 reviewers plus the editor). I’ve never before thought about allowing journals to charge X Pub Creds in order to pay for X-1 reviews, but offhand I don’t see a huge obvious problem with it. This could open up an avenue for limited competition among journals. One could imagine a journal charging as little as 1 Pub Cred for submissions, and allowing its editors to make all decisions unaided by external reviews. I’ll need to think more about how this limited flexibility would work in practice, and whether it would create any perverse incentives or unwanted side effects.

Thanks again to Ethan for taking the time to offer his thoughts, and for allowing Owen and I the chance to respond. It’s always a pleasure when one’s ideas spark this kind of feedback.

Ethan White’s lab at Utah State University is looking for a postdoc to collaborate on research studying approaches for unifying macroecological patterns (e.g., species abundance distributions and species-area relationships) and predicting variation in these patterns using ecological and environmental variables. The project aims to 1) evaluate the performance of models that link ecological patterns by using broad scale data on at least three major taxonomic groups (birds, plants, and mammals); and 2) combine models with ecological and environmental factors to explain continental scale variation in community structure. Models to be explored include maximum entropy models, neutral models, fractal based models, and statistical models. The postdoc will also be involved in an ecoinformatics initiative developing tools to facilitate the use of existing ecological data. There will be ample opportunity for independent and collaborative research in related areas of macroecology, community ecology, theoretical ecology, and ecoinformatics. The postdoc will benefit from interactions with researchers in Dr. White’s lab, the Weecology Interdisciplinary Research Group, and with Dr. John Harte’s lab at the University of California Berkeley. Applicants from a variety of backgrounds including ecology, mathematics, statistics, physics and computer science are encouraged to apply. The position is available for 1 year with the possibility for renewal depending on performance, and could begin as early as September 2010 and no later than May 2011. Applications will begin to be considered starting on September 1, 2010. Go to the USU job page to see the full advertisement and to apply.

If you’re interested in the position and are planning to be at ESA please leave a comment or drop me an email (ethan.white@usu.edu) and we can try to set up a time to talk while we’re in Pittsburgh. Questions about the position and expressions of interest are also welcome.

At first look this seems like kind of a cool idea and I’ve seen a recent surge of interest in it via email and an enthusiatic post over at i’m a chordata urochordata. However, there are, as I see it, two major challenges for this type of system. The first is that in order to make it function properly there have to be a bunch of detailed rules in place for special circumstances. The authors of the proposal address some of these and acknowledge that there will be others†. But who should make these rules? Certainly we won’t all agree on the best solutions (e.g., I think that forcing reviewers to rereview manuscripts without additional credit, as proposed, is dangerous and likely to lead to increasingly poor editorial practice*), so who decides. I,for one, would be loathe to hand this responsibility off to the publishers‡, so I guess we’ll need some sort of council of researchers, from across a breadth of disciplines and countries, preferably elected in some sort of democratic process and then they can meet and vote on the rules. That sounds difficult to setup and organize, but we are talking about a group that is going to control a major aspect of the scientific process, so we’d better do it right.

The other major challenge is setting up the actual technical aspects of the system. Fox & Petchey suggest that given currently available web technology that the basic setup should be no more than three person-months, and that sounds about right to me for the basic site. But it ignores some important complexities. The most serious of these is the lack of a universal author identification system. There are tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of individuals contributing to the writing and review of papers across disciplines and this will lead to numerous instances where authors/reviewers have similar/identical names. There are initiatives underway to address this problem (primarily motivated by search issues), but none of them is complete and we are probably years away from an agreed upon standard within disciplines (let alone among them). Until such a system becomes established it is difficult to understand how PubCreds could properly operate. I suppose the PubCred system could try to take on this responsibility itself, but I suspect that the political realities of numerous groups competing to provide this service will make that complicated.  In addition we would presumably need to consider a secure solution for validating payments from non-lead authors (in the proposal authors are allowed to split up the “cost” of review however they deem appropriate). If this is really going to be such a valuable currency as to solve the reviewer issue then it will be valuable enough to generate unseemly behavior. Maybe a simple email confirmation process would suffice, but we need something to prevent the lead author from unilaterally deciding on how to divide up the cost. Regardless, my point is simply that while the basic system is easy, if we are going to use this to literally govern whether or not a (potentially important) scientific paper can be submitted, then the system needs to be about as robust as a banking system, and accounting for complex contingencies and putting together appropriate security makes this quite a bit more than a 3 person-month job.

So I guess we’d better get to work, because to do this properly is going to take a lot of organization and some serious effort. Or, we could just “privatize the reviewer commons” in exactly the same way we “privatize” everything else. We could use money. This has already been proposed quite eloquently in an editorial by Lonnie Aarssen (and he even implemented this idea for a while at his new journal – IEE; see also the follow up editorial) that we’ve discussed here before. The current proposal discounts this possibility because:

…a fee-to-submit system would disadvantage authors who lack the means to pay, might require exorbitant payments in order to attract referees who would not otherwise agree to serve, likely would cause authors to avoid journals charging submission fees, and would require frequent currency exchange due to the international nature of science.

I consider the first three points to be logically flawed relative to the proposed system for the following reasons (in the same order as the original objections):

1. We’re all broke in PubCred land. We all start with zero credits and have to earn enough to submit manuscripts. If we replace credits with a fixed payment – fixed fee system where each reviewer is paid one third of the cost of a submission for each review then this is exactly the same situation as if I have $0 in my bank account. I have to review 3 papers to have earned enough money to submit one.
2. It doesn’t matter how high these numbers have to get because they are offset by the cost of submitting a paper.
3. Just like the proposed PubCred system, this only works if a large number of powerful journals are involved in a coordinated manner. Clearly having a small number of journals implement either system will lead to authors simply avoiding those journals (as happened to IEE when it tried implementing the money based system).

So, it seems to me that a simple logical substitution of dollars for credits negates all but one of the supposed objections to a monetarily based system. The final point related to currency exchange simply seems inconsequential.

In addition to being more straightforward than implementing a new PubCred system, I think that a monetary approach has an additional advantage. It allows the market to operate on the peer review system. I’m sure that I haven’t even begun to imagine all of the ways that the market could influence peer review, but here’s a short list of things that come to mind:

1. Great reviewers could be rewarded more than mediocre reviewers. PubCred treats reviews dichotomously. They are either good enough for credit or not. But we all know that reviews and reviewers don’t just fall into two groups, so why not reward reviewers on a sliding scale. Each journal can keep track of the quality of reviews and use that information to decide how much to offer a reviewer to entice them to review.
2. Journals that want papers reviewed faster can offer higher payments to entice reviewers.
3. Top journals that want more reviewers can charge higher submission fees to cover the expense.
4. Down the road this potentially provides an avenue for appropriately charging for-profit journals for the massive amount of… free… labor upon which they rely to make large profits.
5. Funding agencies and universities could potentially stop funding publication costs.

In conclusion I should say that I am super impressed with Fox & Petchey for being some of the first folks out there to actually put forth a serious suggestion for fixing the current problems with peer review and I think that they have (with an appropriately long lead-time and substantial up-front investment) come up with a system that would actual work. It’s just that overall it seems like there is a much simpler approach available. Take their approach, replace each credit with a fixed number of dollars (to start), and as a result get rid of all of the decision making and infrastructure.

UPDATE: Owen Petchey’s name is now spelled correctly. Sorry Owen.

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†Even the most basic rule of a 3:1 ratio of reviews to submissions seems like it should be a topic of discussion. What about journals like Science and Nature that due to an abundance of caution often get 3-5 reviews on a manuscript instead of the standard 2. Because the current proposal does not allow different journals to charge different numbers of credits for submissions or provide less credit for reviews, journals that utilize more reviewers will put a burden on the system (NB: editors also receive credit for managing manuscripts so the 3:1 ratio is really appropriate for a standard 2 reviewer system). So, should the ratio be increased to 4:1 or 5:1 or should journals be given flexibility with regards to credits and/or payments?

*We here at JE have noticed an increasing trend of late in the number of re-reviews requested and an apparent unwillingness on the part of some editors to take the time to evaluate whether the changes recommended by the reviewer have been provided. Instead they simply keep sending the paper back to the original reviewers until they have no comments left. This slows down the system, wastes reviewer time and motivation, frustrates authors, and under the proposed system there is no disincentive to stop editors from doing this ad nauseum – the reviewer has no recourse because if they don’t complete the potentially never ending re-reviews they receive no credit.

‡Who are in most cases motivated more by profit margins than the good of science. This is perfectly reasonable given that in the vast majority of cases they are private corporations, but it means that we don’t want them being the ones who are making critical decisions that would have large impacts on the scientific process.

I see I have made myself a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free of Mr Linus’s business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do for my private satisfaction or leave to come out after me. For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or become a slave to defend it.

Go check out the full post.

(via James Horey)

One of the major challenges to understanding ecology is that there are so many different ways to characterize the structure of ecological systems. This means that we spread our intellectual efforts across a large number of different questions making progress in any given area relatively slow. In recent years the field has begun to recognize that many of these patterns are related to one another meaning that understanding ecological structure may be simpler than we thought. This has resulted in the publication of a number of theories that appear to successfully predict multiple ecological patterns. McGill’s contribution is to recognize that all of these theories are successful because they produce three simple things:

1. Spatial aggregation of individuals within species
2. A broad scale distribution of abundances with many rare species and few common species
3. And independent occurrence of individuals of different species

Instead of claiming that this simply makes ecology null and uninteresting McGill recognizes that it just simplifies our challenge and makes a general understanding of many ecological patterns something that might be tractable. The challenge for (macro)ecologists is now to understand the three patterns above along with patterns of species richness and total community abundance. Go read.

We think this is a cool idea, but currently it is a relatively ineffective way to find interesting papers; primarily because there simply aren’t enough folks in ecology discussing what they’ve read. EEB and Flow does a great job of this and a few other blogs by practicing scientists make occasional contributions in this regard (e.g., I’m a chordata, urochordata), but there certainly isn’t a critical mass yet. Part of the reason for this is that putting together full posts on articles one has read can take quite a bit of time, and time isn’t something most of us have a lot of lying around. Here at JE we have half a dozen Research Blogging style posts that we keep planning on writing, but finding a couple of hours to reread the paper and a couple of related works and put together a full post just doesn’t seem to happen.

So, today Jabberwocky Ecology announces a new kind of post – Things you should read. The idea behind these posts is to reduce the activation energy for posting about papers that we like. As such, these might be as short as the title of the paper and a link. Most of the time we’ll try to contextualize things a bit with a few sentences or a paragraph to help you figure out if the linked material is relevant to you, but these won’t be full blown summaries because these are things you should read, not things you should read about.

Let me be clear, I am not saying that the book is dead, in one regard it is already dead, in another it continues to haunt us and will never die. And we should be glad for this haunting there are many features of the book from which we benefit. What I am saying though is the centrality of the book is gone, and academia would do well to recognize this, to move into new directions, new grounds, where many already are. We should not continue to constrain our thinking by this librocentricism which no longer structures or limits the way that knowledge is produced, archived, or disseminated.

The post is pretty long, but it’s well worth the read.