Wafik S. El-Deiry, Director of Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown University and Chair of the WIN Consortium in Cancer Personalized Medicine, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“We publish papers when we have stories to tell taking into account for certain chapters what it would take to get to the next level of knowledge.
If a story will take 1, 2, 3 or more years then it makes sense to publish chapters discussing limitations and future directions.
This allows authors to share their stories without being trapped in experiences of 3-5 or more years with zero guarantees they will be successful in publishing in top tier journals.
The internet is the great equalizer and online publishing has enabled average authors to disseminate their science in a competitive environment with fierce competition for very limited space in top tier journals.
In the last couple of decades the amount of data in individual manuscripts has grown exponentially often with hundreds of figure panels, supplementary data with hundreds more and online archives of yet more data.
Overall that in my opinion is insane and what is not sustainable given realities of what individuals can contribute and funding limitations.
The decision to publish is impacted by researchers moving on, available resources that often limit use of very expensive technologies and a need to support individual careers of young researchers.
It’s not about the numbers that end up being what they are often due to additional contributions through collaborative research.
I don’t see collapse but rather a failure of funders to adequately support the most promising research.
I should add that most scientific contributions highlight a novel discovery or insight and then the publication expands on this with additional evidence in support of conclusions.
I personally think smaller papers that capture innovative advances that others can follow up on are just as important as the tomes that some high impact papers have become.
The amount of time and greater chances of what are mostly minor errors go up with the larger manuscripts and this only feeds into the post-publication inquisitions that have now become daily activities attacking and discrediting scientists including ones who don’t abide by certain narratives.
It is important for the community to read papers they are interested in and focus on what is presented as far as data.
This should be the case with grant reviews as well rather than blindly assuming seminal work because of where it was published or less reliable science that doesn’t end up in top tier journals.
Such journals have over the years wasted our time and I have had quite a few colleagues that don’t bother sending papers there anymore to avoid delays in sharing research results.
I’m going to halve my publication output. You should consider slow science, too.”
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