Multiple hypocrisies of science publishing

I received a desk rejection from Science yesterday which is worded “We now receive many more interesting papers than we can publish. Therefore, our decision is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of your work but rather of our stringent space limitations.”

Nothing unusual in getting rejected as well as in the stereotyped draft of the rejection letter from Science. This is a typical rejection draft from almost all high ranking journals. What strikes me is the statement that the rejection does not reflect on the quality of work. This they say for every desk rejection. Do we take it as a true statement? If we do, then all the importance given to journal prestige, impact factors and other indices become meaningless. We believe that some journals represent high quality because their peer reviews are more rigorous and they select only high quality articles. But these journals are officially admitting that the belief is not true. They certify that acceptance-rejection is dependent on something other than quality, whatever it is.

But in academia, people only look at the name of the journal. Hardly anyone ever reads a paper to decide its quality. The name of the journal is assumed to reflect the quality of the paper. This is not only a contradiction. It is hypocrisy. And this is not the only one. Academia is founded on a series of such principles that obviously hide truth and pretend that it does not exist. Alternatively they make official statements which are obviously not true but they pretend them to be true.

The acceptance rate is often considered a marker of the prestige of a journal, but this they don’t  state openly. In official statements and published articles it is emphasized and repeatedly said that acceptance rate is not a marker of journal quality (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3526365 ). But most journals proudly make their acceptance rates public in some way or the other, which does not serve any other purpose. It is unlikely that authors who do not have high quality work are persuaded not to submit to a journal by looking at the high rejection rate. The rejection is not linked to quality by their official statement anyway! A high acceptance rate is equally unlikely to attract authors because of the impression (right or wrong) that such journals are low prestige journals. If prestige was not linked to acceptance rates and authors responded positively to high acceptance rates then there would soon be equilibrium where submissions to all journals would have been similar. This is not the case. So what purpose journals achieve by declaring their rejection rates? It is certainly being used as a marker of journal prestige. The rejection letter therefore fails on logical integrity. But does science really need logical integrity? Looking at the publication system it doesn’t seem so.

If I write in a paper that I have done experiments to arrive at such and such inference. The experiments will remain confidential, I will not declare them but you accept my inference as tested and found to be true. Which journal will accept such a paper? They expect us to give all details of experiments, data sources, analytical methods and whatever. But they say they have performed a rigorous peer review and found such and such paper of publishable quality. They will keep the peer review confidential but readers are expected to accept their decision! What can be more hypocritical than this?

The dictionary meaning of the word “peer” implies a level ground. Peer reviewer is another research worker standing at the same level as the authors. Ideally both should be able to engage in an argument on level ground. Reality is far from being so. The reviewer is the master who rarely gets challenged. Authors are often ready to modify, even spin their statements completely to “please” the reviewers. I have experienced this as a reviewer as well. Making the author cite reviewers’ references, even if irrelevant, is just too common. So certainly use of the word “peer review” is hypocrisy in itself.

The fact that peer reviews are intrinsically biased has been demonstrated with well designed randomized controlled experiments which are published in a “high ranking” journal presumably after rigorous peer review (https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2205779119 ). At least those who believe that high ranking journals have more rigorous peer reviews should accept what this paper says. And this paper says that peer reviews are intrinsically biased.

Peer review has always been a belief based system. There is no evidence that every paper published in a prestigious journal is peer reviewed except for those journals that have started publishing peer reviews along with the paper. The confidential peer review system always works on a religious like belief system. You need to believe that the peer reviews select for good quality papers and you are not allowed to ask for any evidence of peer review. But the demonstration of the deep rooted biases in peer reviews has evidently shown that it is a false belief. Now the faith has become “blind faith”. It’s not only that you believe without evidence, it amounts to believing in spite of clear evidence on the contrary. Science publishing runs entirely on this blind faith, worse than a religion!!

What have journals done to recognize and minimize the biases? Most have done nothing even after the demonstration of strong biases and flaws. Some have adopted “double blind” peer reviews. Is this a good solution? Certainly not in the era of preprint publishing. If a preprint is already publicly available, the authors cannot be kept anonymous and therefore a pretense of double blind peer review is another hypocritical stance.

Open access publication is a big trend today. The true reasons for the new trend are different and the ones propagated are entirely different. Now since protecting access of online articles is becoming tougher day by day, hacking has become easy and debatable initiatives such as Sci-hub are making everything available free of cost. As a result profit from the reader side is becoming increasingly impossible. So now the new business model is to make profits from the author side. This is easier since the payment comes even before publishing. An ethical looking mask of this business model is called “open access publishing”. If making science open access was the objective then already there are many journals run by societies and academies that are free at both ends. Indian academies have a particularly successful model. This has been there for decades, but now the old wine is being distributed in a new bottle called “diamond open access” as if they have invented a new model of publishing.

But what about journals that charge on both ends? Interestingly they also glorify open access. They extort the authors exorbitantly as it is, but if the authors want their article to be open access, then they charge even more. They are perhaps the best business models but call themselves science journals and stupid scientists strive to get published in them because they are the highest impact factor journals. They are believed to have the most rigorous selection of articles. But these journals are themselves denying that there acceptance rejection reflects the quality of the paper. Researchers are keen to publish there because it funding, fame and promotions and what not. There is experimental demonstration that the details of a funding proposal are irrelevant for getting funded, only a CV with big journal publications matter. Hiding or changing the full proposal text did not affect funding decisions in the experimental test, which means funding decisions are taken without reading the proposals (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04968-7 ), a clear demonstration that only the journal names bring funding. In spite of this, these journals, in their official letters, say rejection does not reflect on the quality of the article!

The height of hypocrisy is the new trend seen in journals including Nature. Nature is publishing articles after articles on the multiple types of misconduct in science publishing. But the tone is that other journals are doing this. There is no article challenging the illogical practice of charging on both ends which Nature does as a norm. It is still not ready for any fundamental change by itself. It simply amounts to throwing stones on others’ glasses. A good case is that of the retracted paper on superconductivity (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03398-4). In spite of severe criticism of the peer review process, Nature did not make the peer reviews public.

One more example of hypocritical behaviour comes not from science publishing but from academia itself. Over the last couple of decades there has been substantial research on behaviour based system design from many researchers. These researchers talk about regulatory policy, governance systems and business. Interestingly none of them talk about behaviour based design of academic systems, while we know that these are deeply flawed systems. They do not want to mend their own house, but keep on supplying architectural advice to others’ houses.

My sample of academia that reflects my limited exposure might be small. But if this small sample reveals so many contradictions and illogical systems, what the total would be is left to anyone’s imagination.