Communicating research

The big cola companies Pepsi and Coca-Cola are constantly at war with each other for dominance of the un-healthy foods market. And the weapons of choice employed in this battle to capture the public mindscape are the TV and print commercials. Sometimes these ads are witty and interesting to watch, but most times they down right nasty where one company takes potshots at the other’s products (here’s an example). This was what I was reminded of while reading a recent report in Science which the journal claimed were the results of an year-long “sting” operation carried out to expose the ugly underbelly of Open Access research publishing (here is the link; but I am not sure if the full text can be accessed without a subscription to Science). In my opinion, this was not an honest “sting” Operation and Science was taking a cheap-shot at the Open Access movement that is starting to threaten the subscription access model that journals like Science have been employing to exploit (I’m tempted to say extort) the research community. If the study was objective, the fake paper should have also been submitted to the traditional subscription-access journals from the stables of Nature, Springer, Wiley and Science itself. The sample selection for the study is clearly biased and was done to fit into a pre-determined outcome. In fact, it could be a textbook case of how not to design a research study. Anyway, the point of this post is not to criticize the Science report (there is plenty of that already in the blogosphere, like this for example), but to present my views on communicating research findings.

Just like religious books had once served a  useful purpose in setting order in society before the advent of Democratic governments and constitutions, the subscription-driven, peer review backed research journals too had played a very important role in furthering the cause of research communities in a pre-internet world. The basic idea behind the origin of journals was the need to communicate latest research findings to the widest possible academic audience. So, a system developed where by the research from all over the world will be collected, published in the form of a book and distributed to everyone that wanted to read. Since printing and distributing these research records involved considerable expense, a fee was collected from those who wanted to read them. But evolution of the world wide web has made the hard copy journals irrelevant. Now almost everyone discovers and keeps to date with the latest developments in the research world on the internet. The open access journals that publish online and provide access to their content to everyone free of charge are fast overtaking the traditional publications. But even the open access journals, though an improvement, have not been able to shake off all the deficiencies. Specifically, the reliance on the age old practice of peer-review to judge the quality of research to be published still continues. My biggest problem with the anonymous peer-review practice is the conflict of interest that arises due to the fact that these reviewers are by rule competitors. The entire process is built on the foundation of abstract ideas like honesty and trust.

Also, though there is no charge to read the articles published in open access journals, they do charge the authors to publish their findings. I basically think even this is unnecessary expense of scarce research funds that could be expended on doing the research. Since the very idea of research publications is to communicate one’s work to the wider community, there are many alternate ways available today to accomplish that. And most of them come at almost no expense to either the author or the reader. For example, I plan on using this blog space to regularly publish my research findings and then publicize/communicate them to my peers using social media avenues like Twitter, ResearchGate, Mendeley etc. Since the content on blogs and other social media sites are indexed by search engines such as Google, it won't be difficult for those interested to find and access the information on the internet, just the way they do now. Of course, I will have to wait to establish myself as a principal investigator before implementing this plan and taking the liberty to challenge the established tradition of research communication. But I have a very strong feeling that something similar or a variation of this approach will be embraced by the wider research community in the very near future. And we can all spend more energy on doing, rather than writing and presenting, novel science.