This is not a discussion list, however ..
Riccardo Rigon
Dear All,
While AboutHydrology is not typically a platform for discussions, an exception was made for this sensitive topic of publication on MDPI. We've already received one response. To ensure the conversation remains productive, I encourage all contributions to be well-reasoned and supported by clear arguments, rather than simple expressions of support for any particular stance.
Additionally, I propose we limit the duration of this discussion to the upcoming week.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
Best regards,
RR
Axel Bronstert
Dear Demetris, dear Jan, , dear colleagues,
thank you, in particular to Demetris, for this open discussion. I think it is a very important topic. My experience (and feeling) is that the whole publication system is totally overheated and thus failing in many circumstances. This is not new, but for > 10 years or even more. The new publishers, like MDPI (and several others) try to benefit from this system, the same way (or even a bit less) than the others, long established, publishers, like Elsevier, Springer, Wiley et al.. By the way, the German sciences system had a several-year-long discussion (and fight) with the conventional publishers (in particular with Elsevier), because their subscription prices increased every year with tremendous rates. This issue is now partly solved, however, still under discussion and dispute. For several years, the subscription of ALL Elsevier journals (i.e. several thousand journals) was stopped for all German universities and research institutions. This made Elsevier a bit more ready to go for a compromise(just a bit, though…)
I feel that scientists are somehow trapped in this system. "The system" tells us scientists that publications are the only currency unit for productivity. And the number of citations as a measure for success (or even worse: for good scientific work). And we know that this is wrong, but we keep on going telling this our PhD students 8and even to the master students). And we demand from them to publish their results, “whatever it takes”.
But, many of us accept this trapping, or at least feel that one has no other choice. In particular young scientists are pressed to join this system (“Publish or parish” or more exact: “publish or you will not get your PhD-title”). However, it is also in parts quite convenient. In particular, if you work in a country or for a university who pays for the subscription rates or the processing fees. But ask scientists from poorer regions..... How difficult it is for them to publish in this system.
Anyway. AboutHydrology is not an ideal place to discuss this issue. Though it is a nice start.
One may organize a discussion session during AGU and EGU? What do you think?
Kind regards,
Axel Bronstert
Hydrologist, University of Potsdam, Germany
Vice-President German Hydrological Society
Riccardo Rigon
On 23 Sep 2024, at 09:47, Axel Bronstert <axel.br...@gmail.com> wrote:One may organize a discussion session during AGU and EGU? What do you think?
Upmanu Lall
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My Columbia University Page, Columbia Water Center
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Researchgate, Academia, Scopus Author ID: 7007127326
alviglio
Roberto Fernández
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Riccardo Rigon
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Rolf Hut
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alviglio
Francesca Pianosi
Sent: 23 September 2024 15:59
To: Riccardo Rigon <riccard...@unitn.it>
Cc: alviglio <alvi...@gmail.com>; AboutHydrology <abouthy...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [AboutHydrology] This is not a discussion list, however ..
Dörthe Tetzlaff
Dear all,
here some thoughts and experiences from my side: in my role as an author, supervisor, mentor, Head of Department, Editor, Associate Editor, Member of Review Editor Boards, and Editor in Chief (since 2015, Hydrological Processes Wiley). What is similar for all of these roles is trying to get novel research insights published in readable , good quality papers which will be read by the community and HELP to increase knowledge of the community.
I am still astonished how few people (in particular ECRs) know about the different DEALS and agreements which exist (Wiley has this for many countries and also individual institutions) which allow free open access (for all Wiley journals where these AGREEMENTS exist). Make use of those Agreements.
Second: in my view one should not review a paper if one hasn’t even published themselves! So, get experience by publishing at least some papers first, then work together with a more experienced scientist on your first reviews. If you are asked to review a paper without having published yourself: be so strong and kind and let the editor know (they don’t see that in the system / they don’t know). Its easy to let an editor know that you will have our review checked by your mentor / supervisor. Ensure to provide constructive and kind reviews. When you do a review: put yourself in the position of the authors: what kind of review would YOU like to receive? What would help YOU?
Thirdly, to gain editorial experience: again – link up with more experienced colleagues in a guesteditor team and ask for tips and insights. Everyone starts at some point: but its OK to ask for advice from more experienced colleagues (Editors in this case).
I agree with others: do NOT fall for these emails telling you they need YOUR expertise in guestediting a Special Issue (and then leave you handling it all by yourself). Rather: THINK about a topic yourself and approach a journal with your idea – a journal where the editorial office will support you. Established journals provide good support for guesteditors: so it can be a good experience for the guesteditors, reviewers AND authors.
To all my fellow AEs and Editors: PLEASE do not just send reviewer invites out again and again. If authors have clearly addressed all reviews - it is OK to do your own evaluation and accept a paper!
If there are minor revisions: it is OK to again conduct an evaluation yourself and accept a paper. Further, please do initial checks of submitted papers (before burdening the reviewer community – i.e. us): if its clear to YOU a paper will be rejected because of poor presentation, out of scope or other reasons – the likelihood is quite high that also reviewers will reject that paper. Rather: use the immediate reject option and do what editors are supposed to do: to guide and help authors towards strong and high quality papers. Often, some rewriting / different presentation following EDITORIAL suggestions make all the difference and we have saved the community from several unnecessary reviews and review invites.
Lastly, I also share the experience from my colleagues: promotion, appointment and other panels/ committees more often than not view papers published in MDPI journals as “low quality” papers (i.e. as in “they would publish anything anyway”). OF COURSE: there are exceptions and some guesteditors of MDPI SIs did an incredible job or proper peer review. But these are exceptions.
I am not sure how EGU sessions will help (as Rolf wrote – we have done this for years); at EGU and AGU. But it needs some kind of community effort: not to moan or complain but to think about joint and constructive ways forward. It was shown how powerful boycotts and clear messages to publishers can be… BUT in my view we also need to start within us, and our community (as WE do not everything right and how it could be (see some examples listed above).
Maybe some kind of “Hydrology publishing workforce” or initiative could be established?
BUT – Riccardo (and I write this with a smile), maybe we DO need an established listserver like abouthydrology (where people subscribe voluntarily to) to do this (then we can reach a very wide geographically distributed community).
So – phew, I am hoping I am still within the “submission deadline” for these thoughts.
Best wishes
Doerthe
Doerthe Tetzlaff MSc, PhD (Dr.rer nat.), DSc
Professor in Ecohydrology -- Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin;
Head of Department “Ecohydrology & Biogeochemistry” -- IGB Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology & Inland Fisheries
Honorary Professor -- University of Aberdeen
Fellow American Geophysical Union AGU, Fellow Royal Society Edinburgh RSE, Fellow Geological Society America GSA, Fellow of The European Academy of Sciences, Member Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Editor-in-Chief Hydrological Processes
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/TetzlaffEcoHyd
Mueggelseedamm 310, 12587 Berlin
From: abouthy...@googlegroups.com <abouthy...@googlegroups.com>
On Behalf Of Riccardo Rigon
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2024 4:39 PM
To: alviglio <alvi...@gmail.com>
Cc: AboutHydrology <abouthy...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [AboutHydrology] This is not a discussion list, however ..
I have seen that the discussion had interesting and important contribution. I suggest to stop it at 24:00 ECT tonight instead than at the end of the week, less than 8 hours from now. I also suggest Jan and the other willing contributors to communicate directly to Alberto Viglione for organising what will be in perspective a very interesting debate, to which it will be probably also interesting to have the participation of publishers.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/abouthydrology/5CD51FB6-71CE-42FF-892C-D0AD022A03C3%40unitn.it.
Beven, Keith
There are clearly already plenty of outlets for publication for both pre-print and refereed work. The questions are who decides on quality control and is the cost within reach (particularly now that many funding agencies are insistent on Open Access publication which normally requires the upfront payments that has been driving the hosts of new for profit journals).
Even if more “freely open” outlets were developed, these issues do not go away. There is a cost to pay for the administration of a journal or equivalent, however much it might depend on the voluntary time of editors and referees (which effectively all the current profit-making journals make use of already). There is also a cost (and an environmental cost) for the maintenance and storage of materials on the internet, however much that might be farmed off to a cloud provider. Those costs have to be supported somehow, as is seen with the paper charges for the “Community” journals such HESS and the others supported by EGU (albeit that AGU and EGU still see these journals as income sources). HESS, in fact, was set up exactly to counter some of the deficiencies in the publish for profit journal system.
But, to my mind, the most important issue is quality control. At present, this is manifest as a sort of hierarchy of journals in terms of confidence in the quality of their accepted papers. There is no explicit ranking, only a rather fuzzy relative measure of confidence sort of linked to citation statistics. But even with some well-established and highly cited journals, we almost all have some horror stories of papers being accepted or rejected not for very good reasons (I have had many rejections in my career, including the original Topmodel paper that is now my most highly cited paper. I have also had to decline submitting to or refereeing for certain journals, including WRR, for several years because of what I considered to be poor editorial practice).
So quality control is a somewhat variable quantity in that it inevitably depends on personal preferences and opinions, particularly in controversial areas. I have been accused of publishing material that is wrong or incoherent or undermining the science, but which really was only following a different philosophy. But quality control, in the sense of avoiding some really incorrect analysis or modelling results, is still really important and can be helped by transparency in the process, again such as with HESS. So one obvious solution to this dilemma is to only submit and referee for the open and transparent community journals – which works of course until you get a paper rejected that you still think is worthy of publication (and most of the major journals are happy to have quite high rates of rejection as an index of quality). You can still put it on Archiv or in a blog with doi as Rolf has suggested, but we know that does not carry the same weight for a young scientist as publishing in a recognised journal even if that might be lower down in the hierarchy.
Ultimately, of course, quality control is personal. We have to make our own decisions about what is relevant to our particular projects. But there are far too many papers published to keep track of the literature even in the main journals. We rely so much on search engines such as Google Scholar to help in keeping track when we need to be sure of finding relevant material. Following up that material flows from title to abstract to (perhaps) scanning the full paper for our own assessment of quality. The problem here, however, is that what we consider is biased by the search ranking which depends not only on relevance to the search phrases but also citations and, as such, introduces circularity. Those papers that get some citations will move up the search list and get more citations. The reason we do not worry too much about that is that it limits what we have to consider in the (always) limited time available. But perhaps we should worry more, when what is most relevant might be only on page 10 of the search results, or does not appear at all because it has no citations.
So it is perhaps not necessarily the range of journals that is the problem but the transparency in quality control and the ways we are able to search the available literature?
k
Lieke Melsen
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