Actualmente existe una necesidad creciente de publicar para mantenerse en el empleo, ganar prestigio o acceder a puestos superiores en el escalafón universitario. Aunque debemos suponer que la inmensa mayoría de la producción científica está generada por gente honrada, es relativamente frecuente el descubrimiento de fraudes de mayor o menor gravedad. Los fraudes en las publicaciones son normalmente discretos aunque existen casos especialmente graves.
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Segunda parte: http://golemp.blogspot.com/2010/11/cosas-sobre-el-fraude-en-la-publicacion_14.html
A los que estén interesados en el tema (básicamente investigadores), les recomiendo este artículo:
http://sciblogs.co.nz/infectious-thoughts/2010/11/13/the-great-publication-fiasco/
1. Researcher writes grant proposal (usually to a publicly funded research council or charity).
2. If lucky enough, researcher gets grant and does research.
3. After years of hard slog, researcher hopefully gets nice data and writes a paper.
4. Researcher sends paper to a journal.
5. Journal sends paper for (mostly unpaid*) peer review.
6. If researcher is lucky their paper is accepted.
7. Researcher signs over copyright to the journal.
8. Researcher generally pays (often in the form of page charges) for journal to publish paper (from 500 to 5000 USD [645 to 6450 NZD] depending on the journal – see here for a comparison
9. Researcher’s institution has to pay a subscription to access the paper.
10. For those institutions that do not have a subscription, individuals can pay a charge to access a particular article. This access can range from 24h to several days. It is currently 32 USD (41 NZD) for 7 days access to a single article published in Nature.
"Does this not seem utterly perverse? It would be interesting to know what NPG’s profits are. If anyone wants to do any digging, NGP is a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd which is owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH publishing group. Wikipedia has a little information about another publisher Elsevier (publisher of Cell, The Lancet, the Trends series and Current Opinions series): turnover of 2.236 billion EUR (3.934 billion NZD) and pre-tax profits of 581 million EUR (1 billion NZD) in 2006."
Conozco el sistema desde dentro, soy "referee" desde hace muchos años de revistas científicas y hace 2 años tiré la toalla y dejé de corregir.
Uno de los problemas (entre otros) es que muchas revistas (con alto índice de impacto, of course) preguntan al investigador quien quiere que sea su “referee”, (una lista de tus amigos).
Hay que modificar el sistema, como sugiere Siouxsie Wiles, pero…
“The obvious exception to this model is the rise in open-access publishing (including Public Library of Science [PLoS], BioMed Central and others) where there is usually a fee to publish but then the material is freely available to all. PLoS also applies the Creative Commons Attribution Licence where the authors retain copyright for their article. The Directory of Open Access lists a staggering 5569 journals, with 43 covering microbiology alone. I’ve only heard of about 5 of them. Some of the more traditional journals are joining in, ‘allowing’ authors to pay a further fee (on top of page charges) to make their article open-access. I’ve just done this for my latest paper (a review article). It cost 3000 USD (3900 NZD).
So I feel I have a dilemma. Strive (or should that be in my wildest dreams?) to publish in journals belonging to NPG? With their high impact factor, papers in such journals are held in high regard and are important for career progression and getting grants. Or go with my principles and aim to publish only in open-access journals regardless of the impact factor? A sort of two finger salute to the old publishing model (and possibly my career…). That’s why I’m so disappointed by UC. Here was a chance for a major institution to kick-start a debate about the ethics of the publishing model favoured by NPG. But no, it seems it’s just business as normal.
* I know of at least one journal that does pay it’s reviewers a small sum. However, the vast majority don’t. A recent report highlighted in an article in the Times Higher Education magazine says UK academics alone spend up to 30 million hours a year carrying out peer review, valuing this time at a staggering 165 million GBP (currently about 342 million NZD). You can begin to see where some of those profits would go to…”