Last week I wrote about the dangers of ‘pay to publish ‘open access’ models , and as I got one more paper to review , written in an unintelligible English from one of those predatory journals, I diligently agreed and then immediately regretted as soon as I got to read just how bad it was… Then I reviewed it and really tried to go beyond the English and get to the science, well the math, and even struggling to understand the equations because nowhere in the paper they described the terms or put unit of measure for them. So I rejected this. Any serious scientist would have. I even tried to be nice and understanding and spent some time writing a nice rejection … and then I saw the letter from the other reviewer . ‘Accept in its present form’. Now. Most likely, given the type of journal, it will soon be published - just as it is.. and most people will stick with some sentences in the abstract. In this case so unintelligible that all you get out of it, is the importance of shellfish and seaweed as carbon sinks, maybe not that ‘damaging’ for humanity, but citing things without understanding them always does a little bit of damage… It adds numbers. One more publication. One more item of clutter in the literature space. It is so fashionable to talk about minimalism in our lives, in our homes, that we still pay little attention to the clutter that we put in the cloud. And this cluttering can mask the things that are really important from those that are less. Wasting public money as things gets repeated and repeated on a small scale. And while science is all about replication, and so in itself is not bad to repeat things, in these days a lot of ecological research is about big issues such as climate mitigation/ restoration and it is ime to stop making small trials yielding confusing outcomes of ‘it’s context dependent’ (yes, well, in ecology it mostly always is..) and go for less but larger scale and more collaborative research outputs. I assume similar parallels could be made in other disciplines and in medical research in particular, especially during this testing time..
Having so many papers out in the cloud in a mix of dubious ‘scientific soundness’ is surely having the result of creating confusions, spreading misinformation especially as these gets cited ad picked up by media. On the other hand, if you are a practitioner you are overwhelmed. For some topics most research outputs give similar results, so maybe the only downfall is that (the company new intern) will be charged with one more thing to read, and one really is left to wonder ‘why did policy not picked up on this?’ (hidden by the overall clutter? Unwillingness of ‘politic’ to read and agree with ‘science?’), but for some topics there are so many different outcomes that really depend on the context or on the methods used.. And what abut the number of ‘handbooks’ that set the goal of summing up the state of the art. Do we really need three or more of the same? That also is overwhelming the system. Just me? As my computer pings with another ‘scholar alert’ with some keywords I set, and there is yet some more ‘carbon capture’ papers being published, I know I am becoming overwhelmed and I am ever so thankful for having a team and for delegating sometimes in the name of teaching and capacity building... but I have the feeling I am not the only one, and maybe, just maybe, it’s time to change the system…
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