Blunt criticism is part of the scientific process. And it doesn't get much blunter than this.
In an article for the Guardian, Randy Schekman, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the 2013 crop of Nobel prize winners, announced that his lab will boycott "luxury" scientific journals, by which he means those commonly regarded as the most prestigious, such as Nature, Cell and Science. Dr Schekman:
These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept. The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called "impact factor" – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking.
