Tag: scientific writing

Audioslides tryout.

One of the new features provided by Elsevier upon publication is the creation of audioslides. This is a kind of short presentation of the publication by one of the authors. I have been itching to try this since our publication on the neutral C-vancancy was published. The interface is quite intuitive, although the adobe flash tend to have a hard time finding the microphone. However, once it succeeds, things go quite smoothly. The resolution of the slides is a bit low, which is unfortunate (but this is only for the small-scale version, the large-scale version is quite nice as you can see in the link below). Maybe I’ll make a high resolution version video and put it on Youtube, later.

The result is available here (since the embedding doesn’t play nicely with WP).

And a video version can be found here.
 

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Robbert Dijkgraaf Essay Contest

In the previous posts, I presented my contribution (original Dutch version / English translation) to the Robbert Dijkgraaf essay contest. This year’s theme was on the importance of imagination in science. My girlfriend, Sylvia, also participated in this essay contest. We read each-others contributions as a final check before submission, and at that point it became clear to me I was out of my league 😳 .

During the gala of science in Amsterdam, the winner of the Robbert Dijkgraaf essay contest was made public. And the winner is: Sylvia Wenmackers.

On her blog you can read the winning essay (in Dutch), and you will understand why I immediately knew my essay was outclassed. Congratulations again my dear 😀 .

 

 

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Publish or perish: of predatory journals and open-access scams

Mantra

In the current academic world, there are two often heard mantra’s: publish more and publish open access. In a world where there are ever more researchers competing for limited financial resources, distribution of these resources needs persistent justification. While funding agencies seem to be in a relentless quest for ‘excellence‘ in research (or just more publications, because that is easily quantifiable), a new side-quest has emerged: ‘open access publication’. This side-quest can either be considered as a move against scientific publishers requesting huge subscription fees from universities or as a further way of justifying what is being done with tax-payer money (with open access the tax-payer can go find out him-/herself ).

Predators

predator by sweens07, http://cyrax-494.deviantart.com/art/Predator-410150978The publish or perish culture has lead to the birth of predatory journals and publishers. These journals more and more act as regular journals (e.g. promising/claiming peer review). However, in the end, as long as a publishing fee is paid your paper will get published. Researchers of ill intend can easily get their work published in such journals and as such inflate their CV. Unfortunately, also poorly informed researchers, with no ill intend, can be trapped by such journals. These journals use rather aggressive mailing campaigns (I generally get a few of these e-mails every week on my academic mail account) and present journals with names rather similar to well established journals. Luckily, after a while you start to recognize the usual predatory publishers such as scirp, bentham science publishers or hindawi publishing. The setup of their mailings are rather similar. There are two main types: the professional journal type and the personal interest type. The first setup starts by presenting their journal as brand new and of high interest to field, indicating that the journal is indexed in several listings (giving it the impression of validity) and finally that there is a publishing charge (which generally isn’t that steep, 100-200$). The second type approaches you noting they have read one of your recent publications, and consider it to be of great quality and interest to the world. After sufficient flattery you are then invited to publish new work with them (which can be done at a special discount).

Predators v2.0

Lately, with the recent quest for open-access publishing (funding agencies/universities requiring of their researchers to publish open access*) these predatory journals moved on. Nowadays, you do not need to pay for publication any longer, you now pay for the “open access” of your work. In my case, the most recent invitation was by intechopen. I was invited to write a chapter in a book on Metal-Organic Frameworks, and since it is open access, it would only cost 670€ in processing charges. No thank you. After a reminder by the publishing process manager I put in the effort to check if they are already blacklisted as a predatory journal/publisher, and yes they are: Jeffrey Beal’s list of predatory publishers. (For the record, if you are invited to write a paper/book-chapter there should be no page/processing charges at all, on the contrary you should actually get a (small) fee.)

How to discern a legitimate journal from a predatory journal?

This question is becoming harder to answer every year. With open access, also regular publishers have discovered a new gold-mine which they are rather eager to excavate. Also with the huge flood of publications that all need to be reviewed by multiple referees, quality in that area starts to degrade slightly but steadily. So what to do?

  1. First, check if it is a journal you have been reading papers from, and remind yourself what ybealls-listou thought of the quality of those papers. You can also ask your colleagues what they think of the quality.
  2. Second, check if the journal actually has an impact factor on for example web of science (if that is the usual practice in your field). This is similar as checking with a credit rating agencies about the status of a country…which may in the long run not be as flawless as expected.
  3. Third, check if the journal/publisher has been blacklisted in the ever expanding list of predatory publishers by Jeffrey Beall. (Although there is some discussion on the validity of the list itself, I believe it to be a good starting point if you are in doubt.)

*They, however, tend to have conflicting standards in this regard. You are on the one hand encouraged to publish in high impact journals and you are required to publish open access. On the other hand however, no additional funding is provided to pay for the open access costs in high impact journals. These costs are often several thousand euros for one publication, or more than half an FWO bench-fee which is to be used for visiting conferences, buying lab equipment or computational resources.

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The Lost Art Of Reviewing: Hints for Reviewers and Authors

The last three months have been largely dedicated to the review of publications: On the one hand, some of my own work was going through the review-process, while on the other hand, I myself had to review several publications for various journals. During this time I got to see the review reports of fellow reviewers, both for my own work and the work I had to reviewed. Because the peer-review experience is an integral part of modern science, some hints for both authors and reviewers:

For reviewers:

  • Do you have time?

    When you get your first request to review a paper for a peer reviewed journal, this is an exciting experience. It implies you are being recognized by the community as a scientist with some merit. However, as time goes by, you will see the number of these requests increase, and your available time decreases (this is a law of nature). As such, don’t  be too eager to press that accept button. If you do not have time to do it this week, chances are slim you will have time next week or the week after that. Only accept when you have time to do it NOW. This ensures that you can provide a qualitative report on the paper under review (cf. point below) No-one will be angry if you say no once in a while. Some journals also ask if you can suggest alternate reviewers in such a case. As a group group leader (or more senior scientist) this is a good opportunity to introduce more junior scientists into the review process.

     Not to be mistaken with predatory journals, presenting all kinds of schemes in which you pay heavily for your publication to get published.

  • Are you familiar with the subject?(material/topic, theoretical method, experimental technique,…)

    You have always been selected specifically for your qualities, which in some cases means your name came up in a google search combining relevant keywords (not only authors and reviewers are victims of the current publish-or-perish mentality). Don’t be afraid to decline if a paper is outside your scope of interest/understanding. In my own case, I quite often get the request to review experimental papers which I will generally decline, unless I the abstract catches my interest. In such a case, it is best to let the editor know via a private note that although you provide a detailed report, you expect there to be an actual specialist (in my case an experimentalist) present with the other reviewers which can judge the specialized experimental aspects of the work you are reviewing.

  • Review a paper without checking out the authors.

    In some fields it is normal for the review process to be double blind (authors do not know the reviewers, and the reviewers do not know the authors), in others this is not the case. However, to be able to review a paper on it’s merit try to ignore who the authors are, it should reduce bias (both favorable or unfavorable), because that is the idea of science and writing papers: it should be about the work/science not the people who did the science.

  • Provide a useful review (positive or negative)

    Single sentence reviews stating how good/bad a paper is, only shows you barely looked at it (this may be due to time constraints or being outside your scope of expertise: cf. above). Although it may be nice for the authors to hear you found their work great and it should be published immediately, it leaves a bit of a hollow sense. In case of a rejection, on the other hand it will frustrate the authors since they do not learn anything from this report. So how can they ever improve it?

  • Nobody is perfect, and neither are our papers.

    No matter how good paper, one can always make remarks. Going from typographical/grammatical issues (remember, most authors are not native English speakers) to conceptual issues, aspects which may be unclear. Never be afraid to add these to your report.

 

For authors:

  • Do not submit a draft version of your paper.

    Although this is a quite a obvious statement, there appear to be authors who just send in their draft to a high ranking journal to get a review-report and then use this to clean up the draft and send it elsewhere. When you submit a paper you should always have the intention of having it accepted and published, and not just use the review progress to point out the holes in your current work in progress.

  • Take time to create Figures and Tables.

    Some people like to make figures and tables, others don’t. If you are one of the latter, whatever you do, avoid making sloppy figures or tables (e.g. incomplete captions, missing or meaningless legends, label your axis, remove artifacts from your graphics software, or even better switch to other graphics software). Tables and figures are capitalized because they are a neat and easy to use means of transferring information from the author to the reader. In the end it is often better not to have a figure/table than to have a bad one.

  • We are homo sapiens pan narrans

    Although as a species we are called homo sapiens (wise man) in essence we are rather pan narrans (storytelling chimpanzee). We tell stories, and have always told stories, to transfer knowledge from one generation to another. Fairy-tales learn us a dark forest is a dangerous place while proverbs express a truth based on common sens and practical experience.

    As such, a good publication is also more than just a cold enumeration of a set of data. You can order you data to have a story-line. This can be significantly different from the order in which you did your work. You could just imagine how you could have obtained the same results in a perfect world (with 20/20 hindsight that is a lot easier) and present steps which have a logical order in that (imaginary) perfect world. This will make it much easier for your reader to get through the entire paper. Note that it is often easier to have a story-line for a short piece of work than a very long paper. However, in the latter case the story-line is even more important, since it will make it easier for your reader to recollect specific aspects of your work, and easily track them down again without the need to go through the entire paper again.

  • Supporting/Supplementary Information (SI) is not a place to hide your work

    Some journals allow authors to provide  SI to their work. This should be data, to my opinion, without which the paper also can be published. Here you can put figures/tables which present data from the publication in a different format/relation. You can also place similar data in the SI: E.g. you have a dozen samples, and you show a spectrum of one sample as a prototype in the paper, while the spectra of the other samples are placed in SI. What you should not do is put part of the work in the SI to save space in the paper. Also, something I have seen happen is so-called combined experimental-theoretical papers, where the theoretical part is 95% located in the SI, only the conclusions of the theoretical part are put in the paper itself. Neither should you do the reverse. In the end you should ask yourself the question: would this paper be published/publishable under the same standards without the information placed in SI. If the answer is yes, then you have placed the right information in the SI.

  • Sales: 2 papers for the price of one

    Since many, if not all, funding organisations and promotion committees use the number of publications as a first measure of merit of a scientist, this leads to a very unhealthy idea that more publications means better science. Where the big names of 50 years ago could actually manage to have their first publication as a second year post doc, current day researchers (in science and engineering) will generally not even get their PhD without at least a handful publications. The economic notion of ever increasing profits (which is a great idea, as we know since the economic crisis of 2008) unfortunately also transpires in science, where the number of publications is the measure of profit. This sometimes drives scientists to consider publishing “Least Publishable Units”. Although it is true that it is easier to have a story-line for a short piece of work, you also loose the bigger picture. If you consider splitting your work in separate pieces, consider carefully why you do this. Should you do this? Fear that a paper will be too long is a poor excuse, since you can structure your work. Is there actually anything to gain scientifically from this, except one additional publication? Funding agencies claim to want only excellent work; so remind them that excellent work is not measured in simple accounting numbers.

 

Disclaimer: These hints reflect my personal opinion/preferences and as such might differ from the opinion/preference of your supervisor/colleagues/…, but I hope they can provide you an initial guide in your own relation to the peer-review process.

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