More applause to the Nature family of journals

Continuing its journalistic examination of the infrastructure of science publishing, and attempts to improve it, the Nature family of journals has made a number of new steps recently.

On the journalistic side, the current issue has a very thought-provoking report by Eugenie Samuel Reich on the effects of publishing in high-prestige journals.  The psychology here is similar to that of hiring managers who use the schools that candidates graduated from as a filter for 'quality'.  Especially for those candidates whose accomplishments are not known and understood by the hiring manager personally, use of the school-filter is a heuristic device for winnowing down the candidate pool.  Similarly, unless you're in the same field as a given scientist, it is difficult for you to evaluate the quality of that person's work and its impact in his/her community.  Seeing which journals the scientist has published in works as a heuristic for making such an evaluation.  Since doing so is easy, and alternative approaches are considerably more difficult and time consuming, the journal-filter is widely used and has real impact in terms of hiring, funding, and status.  Hence, those who have published in Nature or Science belong to a 'golden club'.  Reich's report makes a notable point in the case of astronomy, as people within the field evaluate papers as they are posted on the arXiv preprint server.  This doesn't help those from outside the field, because a pre-print server has essentially no peer review, and only experts can use it well.

Incidentally, the Nobel Prizes serve a similar role for the general public, who are not familiar with the prizes given within a scientific field or sub-field, but everyone knows that the Nobels are the world's highest form of recognition.

On the operational side, the Nature family of journals is apparently the first and only publisher that makes its citation and bibliographic information openly available as "linked open data", according to David Shotton, director of the Open Citations Corpus, in this Nature commentary.  Moreover, Nature is launching an online data journal, according to this announcement.  This step is welcomed as it contributes both to reproducible research and data stewardship, both topics discussed on DTLR in recent months.

Finally, back in August Nature Methods, having concluded a series of tutorials on data visualization ('Points of View'), have started another tutorial series on statistics, called 'Points of Significance.'  The announcement appeared here and was discussed on their blog by Daniel Evanko here.  It is clear to me that both statistical training as well as the understanding of statistical thinking varies greatly among scientists, and hopefully the new series will provide good advice.  Of course, how well the articles in the series are written, and their content, will be crucial to their success.  (The failure of formal statistics courses in producing well informed scientists is a major reason such a series is needed in the first place.  It is very difficult to convey the concepts of statistical thinking, so the challenge for the authors is considerable.)  The first two entries are on sampling error and error bars, both good nuts-and-bolts topics, but hopefully they will get to the nuances of study design and the pitfalls of data analysis in good time.

As one of the 'prestige' journals, Nature is in a unique position to drive real change in the infrastructure of science publishing.  Unfortunately I do not subscribe to their journals (except that I did receive the inaugural year of Nature Physics, which was some time ago) but I do receive Science, which has not emerged as a leader in reproducible research.