Revolution and evolution of scientific publishing

doi:10.15406/mojpb.2016.03.00100

MOJ

eISSN: 2374-6920

Proteomics & Bioinformatics

Editorial Volume 3 Issue 5

Revolution and evolution of scientific publishing

Youhe Gao

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Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Beijing Normal University, China

Correspondence: Youhe Gao, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Beijing Normal University, Gene Engineering and Biotechnology Beijing Key Laboratory, Beijing, 100875, PR. of China, Tel 861058804382

Received: July 01, 2016 | Published: July 5, 2016

Citation: Gao Y. Revolution and evolution of scientific publishing. MOJ Proteomics Bioinform. 2016;3(5):131. DOI: 10.15406/mojpb.2016.03.00100

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Editorial

All scientific publications are quality controlled by peers and/or an editor. The prerequisition for the system to be a complete success is that peers and editor’s comments are more visionary, more impartial and more scientific. Usually a manuscript was sent to more than one peer reviewers. All the questions from all reviewers must be answered to the satisfaction of all reviewers and the editor. If the idea of the manuscript were truely creative, could all peer reviewers and the editor all agree with the authors, especially when the authors can only provide limited rather than comprehensive experimental support? Reviewers have their own standpoint in the field, their own preferences and their own valuation standard. These will all deter them from recognizing authors’ new ideas without reservation. It is very easy for the reviewers to be more scientific, it is not too difficult for them to be impartial, but it is very difficult for all the reviewers to be more visionary than the author at the same time. Theoretically this system is good for quality control of the journal from being too bad, but it is bad for protecting and promoting new ideas.

Protecting and promoting authors’ creativity should be the top priority of scientific publishing.¹ Safeguarding the quality of a journal from the contamination of the worst papers should not be put on the top of the list as it was before, when number of papers that can be accepted by a journal was limited, when a journal’s reputation was measured by the worst paper it published. At internet age, the number of papers published on one journal is unlimited. The search engines have replaced the function of the journal to push only relevant papers to the subscribed readers in the field. It can also filter out the worst papers easily. A journal’s reputation should now be measured by the number of creative papers it published. Without peer review process, the cycle of scientific research can be sped up significantly which can increase the efficiency of scientific research all over the world.² The scientific community can not tolerate that the publishing time is much too long. Something has to change.³ There have been many attempts to change the system. PLoS One gives up the judgment on the significance of the work. F1000 research postpones its open peer review to after publication. Matters publishes incomplete stories. Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal publishes all outputs of the research cycle.

A revolutionary journal (Authors Journal) was proposed for about a year and eventually launched by Medcrave. It publishes almost anything that authors want to without peer review process.⁴ I hope that the journal can take advantages of all that being proposed by above pioneers and give the most creative author complete freedom to publish their works at whatever stage, at whatever form they choose. We do not pretend that we can judge and evaluate on their judgment. We do not judge on their rationale even let alone the format, the style. We give up all the right of an editor, a journal. I consider Authors Journal revolutionary. Revolution is hard to be accepted and recognized. Evolution may be better accepted sometimes. For MOJ Proteomics and Bioinformatics, I propose to proceed at moderate speed. We can start to give authors waiver of peer review. We will give different authors different waiver conditions based on their publication credit. The top scientists in the field can be granted lifelong waiver of peer review. The scientists with publishing records in the field can be granted waiver once a year. The novice who has no publishing record in the field can request waiver to be granted before submission. This way everybody’s works with creativity can be protected.

The freedom of scientific publishing is the ultimate goal of many scientists including myself. The road to the freedom is never easy. The routes of revolution and evolution may experience different degrees of resistance. I am not sure which one eventually reaches the destination first. Let’s move in two different speeds to ensure we get there as fast as we can.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2012CB517606, 2013CB530805), the Key Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013FY114100).