I have been considering publishing my next article in #elife
I was not very convinced by their new #publishing method, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.
What convinced me is that I think of the way I review papers myself. I won't ever reject a paper unless there is something majorly wrong e.g. from an ethical point of view. Instead, I would rather spend time and give constructive and realistic feedback to improve the study.
This is because of two reasons:
1. If the study idea/methodology etc, is good but maybe is missing some key experiment, I think that the authors must have put a lot of effort, time and money into producing this. I have been through the "your work is not fancy enough for our prestigious journal" crap enough times that I will not engage in that. Ever. There is no reason your paper should not publish negative results if the study is well done.
Also, people's jobs and mental health depend on that, which is way more important.
Also, there are plenty of papers in "fancy journals" that are just piles of bs, so I really won't buy into shiny names (I have just spent an entire day trying to run code from several papers published in high-IF journals to no avail...).
2. If the study is poor, it is easy to say: "This is cr*p, straight reject". This just means the authors will submit elsewhere, hoping the next reviewer won't be bothered reading the paper in depth and will let it through. Even worse, this plays into the hands of #predatory journals. I would rather say this can be accepted after all of these major revisions.
The authors get useful feedback on how to improve their study; they might choose not to act on it, but at least I have made my part.
I would be interested in hearing other views on this.
@nicolaromano In principle it's a fine system. In practice, they "desk reject" unusual papers, so the gatekeeping is still fierce, but instead of being done by reviewers who are experts and need to talk to each other (which was the great innovation of eLife) it is now in the hands of an editor who may not read the paper thoroughly and may not be a domain specialist, and does not answer to anyone.
@MatteoCarandini True, but that is a problem with essentially all of the journals. I also thought of just putting things on bioRxiv and leave them there full stop. I don't know if the academic world's ready for that though 😞
@nicolaromano sorry for the late-boosting, but I followed a hashtag and found this convo about eLife - I’m curious, what did you end up doing?
@elduvelle well... things got a little more complicated than I hoped for, then the new semester started, so the paper is still in the making, but 70% done. And I'm still thinking of sending it to eLife. Hopefully early next year if nothing else gets in the way !
@nicolaromano fingers crossed for you!