The celebrated French engineer, Henri Tresca published two papers in 1867 and 1878. 11 years apart. The two papers revolutionized the field of mechanics and the scientific community all over the world found a new area to conduct research on. Although at that time, there was no dearth of research topics, this new area was something special. It had the potential to revitalize the age of industrial revolution. After two world wars, erection of innumerable skyscrapers and multiple spaceship launches, plasticity still remains an active area of research- not fully understood, yet on the brink of being overly exploited. This is not a post about plasticity or Henri Tresca. This is a post about the time gap between the two seminal papers that started it all. When asked about the time gap, Tresca nonchalantly said that he was just performing experiments and it took him 11 years. I first heard this story from a renowned professor in the freshman year of my doctoral studies. Being a doe-eyed young researcher, I had no idea about the professor's frustration that triggered him off to waste the limited amount of time allotted to cover the course syllabus and tell us about Henri Tresca. 6 years and some career shifts later, I share the same frustration, plus some more.
Let us first objectively look at how the "business" of scientific publications work. A researcher, or a group of researchers painstakingly works for months and often years and, jots down their findings in a condensed form that itself takes some more months. After that, the paper is submitted to the journal office for the peer-review process, an editor is assigned who decides whether it should go for expert's opinions or directly thrown back at the authors with a politely camouflaged decision letter and the label 'rejected'. If the paper passes the preliminary scrutiny, the editor attempts to secure 2 or 3 subject experts for reviewing the papers. Based on the received reviews, the editor takes a decision: accept, major revision, minor revision or reject. Depending on the pace of the journal office, this process can take 3-4 months if the authors are lucky, sometimes up to 9-10 months, even a year. For major or minor revisions, again the same process continues. So, if not anything, the whole process of publishing a research paper is time consuming and for a young researcher, anxiety, frustration and trauma inducing. Now, let us talk money. The three most important machineries of scientific publications: the authors, the reviewers and the editors, do not get a single penny. The editor-in-chief sometimes gets an honorarium, which is peanuts as compared to the amount of work and the profits of the publication houses. More on that later.
Why do scientists, researchers and academicians all over the world do these thankless jobs then? Are they not aware of the situation? Well, they are well aware of the situation and most of them would agree that this corporatization of academic world has done more harm to it than anything else. In fact, in an interview to The Guardian, Prof. Peter Higgs, en-route to collect his 2013 Nobel prize in physics, mentioned, "Today, I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough." In the Indian context, the name of another internationally famous physicist comes to mind: Prof. Amal Kumar Raychaudhury. Prof. Raychaudhury developed the famous equation named after him in the theory of general relativity that lead to Pensrose-Hawking singularity theorems and eventually Prof. Roger Pensrose's 2020 Nobel prize. Now, it is time for an interesting anecdote of Prof. Amal Raychaudhuri. He published a paper with the derivation of the Raychaudhuri equation back in 1955. Learning that this paper was highly praised by notable physicists, he submitted his dissertation and obtained his Ph.D. In today's world, one cannot find a single Ph.D. candidate who did not face the enormous pressure to churn out papers. On top of that, in many cases, they have to face unnecessary academic bullying from the advisors and committee members for not being able to be a paper printing machine. It is not unheard of that a Ph.D. candidate was not allowed to graduate because they used to be a paper churning machine and the advisor's greed is yet not mollified. Where does this end?
It is hard to pinpoint since when academia started following the principles of capitalism. But without a doubt, this has been a case for last few decades or so. Prof. P. Balaram, the former director of IISc, Bangalore attempts to answer this question by looking at the renowned scientific journals, their popularity and, publication dates. Prof. Balaram keenly observes that there is a paradigm shift in terms of the change in geographical location of the scientific publication houses which may be correlated with the rise of corporatization in scientific publication. Most of the formerly famous journals were based out of Europe whereas in today's world, all of them, without a fail are based out of U.S., the ultimate hub of capitalism. That observation can be extended to the recent Nobel prize winners in natural sciences as well. More importantly, how many recent Nobel laureates were born out of U.S., but won the prize being a U.S. citizen? Count the numbers (in percentage, of course) and you will be shocked.
Do the consequences of the corporatization end in a researcher's ever worsening mental health issues, academic bullying and financial disparity? No, it has sunk its teeth in academic integrity and now we are walking on an eggshell when it comes to that. Every year so many papers get retracted, some of them are from renowned scientists and Nobel laureates. Forged and falsified data has ended careers, mostly of graduate students and in some rare cases, some stalwarts. The cases of falsified data have increased so rapidly that researchers like Elisabeth Bik found an alternative career as scientific integrity consultant. Numerous non-profit organizations have been launched today that make an attempt to uphold scientific integrity. These efforts are, however, limited to published researches only. How many times it has happened that while a research paper was being reviewed, the reviewer put that paper on hold, recreated the results and published another paper under their own name invalidating any relevance to the former paper? No journalistic efforts can ever reduce the chance of misconduct at the publication stage.
Speaking of misconduct at the publication stage, I was recently asked to review an article for a conference proceeding (i.e., the papers have already been peer-reviewed and presented at a conference). As a part of the review process, I was sent a copy of the decision letter and I noticed something very strange about the comments of the other reviewer. Here is an excerpt:
(1) In title: It would be beneficial to specify the type of work, such as a numerical study on...
(2) In abstract: Provide important results numerically.
(3) The number of key words is large. This section should contain only very important words.
(4) The framework of the paper should be divided as follows:
1. Introduction
2. Materials and methods
This section will explain the methods and models available in the literature that will be used in the present study.
3. Proposed method
4. Results and discussions
5. Conclusions
(5) In my opinion, the introduction is short; on the other hand, more recent works should be added as new references (2022 and 2023). The introduction should be divided into several paragraphs following a specific pattern; for example, it can be divided as follows:
1. Related works in the literature
2. Existing challenges in the literature
3. Current work and contributions
A reviewer's job is never to dictate an author on how to organize a paper, rather to check whether there is any fallacy and look into how the paper may be improved. Not all papers can be written in a very specific structure as mentioned. I am not sure if the paper was reviewed by a seasoned researcher as it should be, or delegated to a student with limited knowledge of scientific writing. Probably an A.I. could have done a better job than this. If the peer-review process is this defective, then upholding scientific integrity is a laughable farce.
I have always felt that I am a man out of time and I should have been born earlier, maybe in the 60's. When it comes to scientific publications, I think many of my peers would love to jump on the Landaulet 184 from Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
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