Faddish science

Randy Schekman won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year, but, according to the Economist , he used the moment in the spotlight “to announce that the laboratory he runs at the University of California, Berkeley, will boycott what he describes as ‘luxury journals,’” like Cell , Nature and Science .

The Economist explains his two complaints against the journals: “The first is that, aware of their pre-eminence and keen to protect it, they artificially restrict the number of papers they acceptacting, as he put it in an interview with the Guardian , a British newspaper, like ‘fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits . . . know[ing] scarcity stokes demand.’ Their behaviour, he says, is more conducive to the selling of subscriptions than the publishing of the best research. Second, he argues that science as a whole is being distorted by perverse incentives, especially the tyranny of the ‘impact factor,’ a number that purports to measure how important a given journal is. Researchers who publish in journals with a high impact factorlike the three named abovecan expect promotion, pay rises and professional accolades. Those that do not can expect obscurity or even the sack, a Darwinian system known among academics as ‘publish or perish.’”

To sneak past the fashion guardians of the gate, Schekman has started publishing the online journal eLife .