Scientific publishing: a tedious process
By: Malte Borggrewe
Tags: Academia, Science Communication, Scientific Publishing, Publishing, Science

It’s worrying that the process of scientific publishing remains more or less elusive for the non-scientific community. We live in a society where every decision and change, no matter how tiny and irrelevant it is, gets scrutinised big time. Yet, science and how science works sometimes seems to escape societies scepticism. Today, I would like to shed some light on how scientific publishing works.

It’s important to know that scientific manuscripts are not just a collection of graphs and tables arranged in the most unreadable way; no, they require a coherent and interesting story. That’s why data collection usually takes several years until it’s solid, replicable (hopefully), and illuminated from different angles. As in other branches, a well-tailored story helps to sell a good (or bad) product, in case of science: data.

Before writing, or at least very earlier in the process, a suitable journal is picked based on audience, field of research, and prestige (measured by the impact factor). It’s not entirely clear how the impact factor is calculated, but generally speaking it reflects the number of citations one article gets on average. Thus, the higher the impact factor of a journal, the more exposure the article may get, which is crucial to get funding and continue research.

There is a massive discussion in the scientific community about the suitability of measuring a scientists success with the number of articles in high-impact journals. That is, however, a topic for a different time.

The manuscript will be written according to journals guidelines which include number of words, figure/text size and format, and other specifics. These guidelines are specific for each journal and thus require to re-format the manuscript upon submission to a different journal. More often than not, articles are submitted to several journals successively due to rejections; hence formatting guidelines can be annoying.

Once the article is written up and the co-authors are happy with the presentation of the data, the manuscript is submitted. Similar to writing guidelines, submission processes also vary a lot between journals and range from easy peasy to what the fuck does this mean now.

After submission, the article will be quality-checked — this can take a couple of days sometimes — and presented to journal editors. These editors read the article and decide whether it would be suitable for publication in this journal. Journals, just like newspapers and magazines, only want to publish what’s potentially interesting for their audience, duh; hence, the majority of articles are already rejected at this stage. So back to the drawing board and re-format the article for the next journal. Fantastic.

It’s a good feeling to receive an email from the editor stating that the precious manuscript has been selected for peer-review. Hurray! But this process is the most crucial step. Other scientists of the same field of research will read the manuscript and comment on novelty, experimental design, gaps in argumentation, lack of experiments, etc. In brief: the manuscript is turned up-side-down and potentially gets destroyed.

Peer-review, of course, is a necessary step in which fellow scientists double-check the work, so that data which is published is trustworthy to some extent. This, however, is no insurance that data is replicable or absolutely bullet-proof. Many articles have been retracted in retrospect because data turned out to be wrong.

You can maybe also imagine that peer-review is somehow problematic because scientists in the same field of research are also competitors. I agree that science should be entirely open and collaborative (yet another discussion), but at this time (2019) it’s difficult to overstate how competitive science can be. Therefore, these peer-reviewing competitors have the ability to suspend the publishing process, which may give them an advantage to publish their results before. This does happen!

Depending on the feedback of the reviewers, editors will decide to either accept the manuscript right away (almost never happens), accept after minor or major revision, resubmit after revision, or reject completely. In reality, most manuscripts require quite some revision work which can take up to several months. Depending on the editors decision, the manuscript will be accepted after these revision are waved through by editors AND reviewers, or the manuscript has to be resubmitted to go through the entire process again.

The whole process of publishing can take up to anything between a few months to a few years depending on the revision work. But good things come to those who wait.

It’s beyond unfair that many articles are hidden behind a paywall, which is absurd since research was financed by society. Fortunately, many universities are pushing for open access publishing, so this problem might be resolved soon-ish (which in science means decades probably).

A few side notes: submitting a manuscript is usually free, but many journals will charge for publishing. For example, publishing open access may cost up to a few thousand euros per article. Many universities will pay these fees for the scientist. Other journals may charge you for colour figures (again absurd if you ask me). What’s also incomprehensible is that reviewers are not getting paid for their service by the journal. They will do it in order to stay on top of recent developments in their field, and to be close to editors and journals.

So why do scientists still publish in these journals instead of just putting the data online themselves? Nowadays, many scientists actually do exactly this. They upload manuscripts to so-called preprint journals. But keep in mind that these manuscripts have never been peer-reviewed, never been double-checked, so anyone could upload anything. Besides, scientists depend on publishing in prestigious journals (= high impact factor) in order to acquire funding. Funding operations will use the amount of papers in high-impact journals as a readout for their success and competence. Fortunately, this issue is recognised by the scientific community and countermeasures are being taken to escape this vicious cycle.

Hopefully, I was able to elucidate some aspects of the secret of scientific publishing and why this system is far from perfect. Let’s hope that the scientific community will continue pushing to evolve this process.