What do you think about “spin-off” journals of prestigious journals?

[futureapppsy2]

I’m talking about things like JAMA/JAMAOpen, Nature/NatureCommunications, The Lancet/any number of their spin-off journals. I think they’re usually done ethically but also that they’re pretty clearly trying to trade off the name of the prestigious flagship journal without having the same reach or guaranteeing the same quality. I’ve also seen authors get “trapped” when they don’t clearly understand the difference between the main flagship and the sister journal, especially when the sister journal is open access.

Thoughts/experiences?

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[Fan_of_Meehl]

I’m talking about things like JAMA/JAMAOpen, Nature/NatureCommunications, The Lancet/any number of their spin-off journals. I think they’re usually done ethically but also that they’re pretty clearly trying to trade off the name of the prestigious flagship journal without having the same reach or guaranteeing the same quality. I’ve also seen authors get “trapped” when they don’t clearly understand the difference between the main flagship and the sister journal, especially when the sister journal is open access.

Thoughts/experiences?

It's going to be really interesting to see what unfolds in the entire 'professional journal' space over the next decade or so now that everything has gone almost completely virtual. Back when everything was physically printed that served as a sort of 'natural firewall' and 'process of selective amplification' for certain academic work, theories, and study results. Now? I mean, there is virtually no limit on the proliferation of information in that arena of various shades of quality and the whole 'selection and filtering' functions are probably going to have to be completely re-conceptualized. In some ways, this is great in that novel ideas (with merit) are more likely to get more exposure but it also creates a 'Wild West' scenario where everybody is publishing everything regardless of quality, precision, theoretical coherence, relevance, etc. Time will tell.

 

[tr]

I think this is really dependent on the journal. Some of them are just a hairsbreadth down from the parent journal in competitiveness/prestige (e.g. Molecular Psychiatry to Translational Psychiatry) and also publish excellent work. Some others are a much bigger prestige reduction and really not worth the potentially huge price tag.

The most critical thing to watch is the indexing. I got really burned once after submitting to Brain, Behavior and Immunity and getting bumped to BBI-Health. My first inclination was to just look elsewhere but the editor waived all the fees because they were trying to launch the child journal at the time, and one of the senior coauthors encouraged me to go with it.

Unfortunately the child journal turned out not to be indexed in PubMed and as a result the paper got totally buried and to this day has received maybe one citation. It was a good paper too, there was some benchmarking in it that is relevant for our field and probably would have gotten a good citation count if it had been discoverable at all. 🙁

 

[Ollie123]

Disclaimer: I don't publish in these journals frequently, but I do have a couple articles in them.

My opinion: Clearly a money grab by the journals as open access proliferates. That said, the work that ends up in them is largely of higher quality than what gets published in random mid-tier specialty jounals - not even to speak of publishers like Hindawi. I think in part because you generally aren't publishing these places unless you have larger grants, which probably serve as "somewhat" of a filter. Most people aren't sinking 6k publication fees without a grant (or at least a sizable startup).

That said, I don't know how these costs are justifiable for an online only article. It doesn't cost 6k to keep an article online. Content editors work for free. Copyeditors at decent journals are actual reasonable professionals, relative to your typical elsevier/springer/etc. copyeditor are a combination of broken computer algorithms and overseas half-wits marginally less competent than a typical call center employee.

 

[PsyDr]

1) I don't understand the business of journals. "Hey, do this work. We won't pay you. Then send it to us. We have a team of unpaid editors, who have a desire to publish their friends or content that benefits their own research. Now we are going to sell this product and charge crazy fees for pdf copies."

2) Print publication is becoming increasingly weird. With the advent of online publication, physical space isn't a limiting factor. We could publish everything under one online journal now.

3) I think having several different journals is a GOOD idea. The problem with having one editorial team, is that bias can become inherent in the process. There is utility in having several different editorial teams, to prevent bias, or insular politics.

 

[Ollie123]

1) I don't understand the business of journals. "Hey, do this work. We won't pay you. Then send it to us. We have a team of unpaid editors, who have a desire to publish their friends or content that benefits their own research. Now we are going to sell this product and charge crazy fees for pdf copies."

I completely understand the business of journals. It is brilliant in an evil genius/supervillain-trying-to-block-out-the-sun kinda way. I do not understand the business of academia and I say this as an academic. We could all just effectively agree to stop publishing crap for the sake of publishing but no one seems to want to do that. I'd wager 19 out of 20 articles reflect things that were ultimately not worth doing and exist only to prop up the researcher's career (and before anyone takes offense, I'd apply that to my own work too). I think the older model of working towards a genuine discovery and only publishing when you legitimately hit it was more effective. The signal-to-noise ratio is just too poor right now.

Think I've posted this before, but we could also effectively just convert all scientific writing to a centralized blog where people can post comments and the authors can respond and update analyses. I'd bet AWS could host literally the entire scientific enterprise for a comparatively negligible sum of money relative to journal operation costs. Especially if data repositories are kept separate and not factored into hosting costs. I'm sure there are ways to effectively decentralize this to address your editorial bias concerns. This may be my retirement project🙂

 

[R. Matey]

Think I've posted this before, but we could also effectively just convert all scientific writing to a centralized blog where people can post comments and the authors can respond and update analyses. I'd bet AWS could host literally the entire scientific enterprise for a comparatively negligible sum of money relative to journal operation costs. Especially if data repositories are kept separate and not factored into hosting costs. I'm sure there are ways to effectively decentralize this to address your editorial bias concerns. This may be my retirement project🙂

Add a comment thread to Research Gate and you're pretty much there.

 

[AbnormalPsych]

I'm surprised research gate is still around and some of these bigger journals haven't gone after them for all the PDFs posted there. Seems like something they'd do.

 

[Ollie123]

I'm surprised research gate is still around and some of these bigger journals haven't gone after them for all the PDFs posted there. Seems like something they'd do.

Don't be too surprised.

ResearchGate dealt a blow in copyright lawsuit

Court ruling says that the academic-networking website is responsible for papers uploaded by its users — but ResearchGate plans to appeal the decision.

www.nature.com

 

[R. Matey]

I'm surprised research gate is still around and some of these bigger journals haven't gone after them for all the PDFs posted there. Seems like something they'd do.

Didn't know about the lawsuit, that's crazy. Some (not all) publishers have rules about what you can put up there. APA, for instance, is fine with you uploading a copy of an accepted, pre-corrected proof with the caveat that it's not the final copy. I had a paper published with Elsevier last year and they were only fine with providing a link to a full text for a limited amount of time. Sage sends burly men with cello cases to your house if you even think about it.

 

[cara susanna]

I always get requests for PDFs and am too scared to post them, so good to know.

 

[WisNeuro]

I always get requests for PDFs and am too scared to post them, so good to know.

I feel like most of your current research would fall under the VHA directives that mandate the work being freely available to the public.

 

[ClinicalABA]

1) I don't understand the business of journals. "Hey, do this work. We won't pay you. Then send it to us. We have a team of unpaid editors, who have a desire to publish their friends or content that benefits their own research. Now we are going to sell this product and charge crazy fees for pdf copies."

At least in our field it's not a pay to publish operation. In some other fields, authors have to pay for the privilege.

 

[futureapppsy2]

I think this is really dependent on the journal. Some of them are just a hairsbreadth down from the parent journal in competitiveness/prestige (e.g. Molecular Psychiatry to Translational Psychiatry) and also publish excellent work. Some others are a much bigger prestige reduction and really not worth the potentially huge price tag.

The most critical thing to watch is the indexing. I got really burned once after submitting to Brain, Behavior and Immunity and getting bumped to BBI-Health. My first inclination was to just look elsewhere but the editor waived all the fees because they were trying to launch the child journal at the time, and one of the senior coauthors encouraged me to go with it.

Unfortunately the child journal turned out not to be indexed in PubMed and as a result the paper got totally buried and to this day has received maybe one citation. It was a good paper too, there was some benchmarking in it that is relevant for our field and probably would have gotten a good citation count if it had been discoverable at all. 🙁

100% agree that indexing is critically important, and I increasingly use indexing as one indicator of quality if I'm unfamiliar with or have questions about a journal, because MEDLINE and SSCI have pretty high indexing standards for journals (I've known very legit, non-OA journals to be turned down by MEDLINE for having too high of an acceptance rate, for example). I wrote off IJERPH until I saw that they were indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE and SSCI, for example, and have since reviewed for and published with them, and they seemed legit for both, albeit with the cavaets that come with any large open access journal (namely, APC costs--I had a waiver--and volume).

 

[futureapppsy2]

I always get requests for PDFs and am too scared to post them, so good to know.

You can also send them privately, which is what I usually do, FWIW.

 

[futureapppsy2]

I completely understand the business of journals. It is brilliant in an evil genius/supervillain-trying-to-block-out-the-sun kinda way. I do not understand the business of academia and I say this as an academic. We could all just effectively agree to stop publishing crap for the sake of publishing but no one seems to want to do that. I'd wager 19 out of 20 articles reflect things that were ultimately not worth doing and exist only to prop up the researcher's career (and before anyone takes offense, I'd apply that to my own work too). I think the older model of working towards a genuine discovery and only publishing when you legitimately hit it was more effective. The signal-to-noise ratio is just too poor right now.

Think I've posted this before, but we could also effectively just convert all scientific writing to a centralized blog where people can post comments and the authors can respond and update analyses. I'd bet AWS could host literally the entire scientific enterprise for a comparatively negligible sum of money relative to journal operation costs. Especially if data repositories are kept separate and not factored into hosting costs. I'm sure there are ways to effectively decentralize this to address your editorial bias concerns. This may be my retirement project🙂

I definitely agree that pressure to publish increases the signal-to-noise ratio, but I also think its important to remember that a) science is iteriative, b) replication and expansion are important, and c) even very niche topics can matter clinically (for example, a friend was diagnosed with a semi-rare cancer while pregnant a few years ago, and it was nice that there was a decent body of case reports on maternal fetal medicine and parent/child outcomes with this cancer, even if there's not going to be enough cases of this cancer occuring during pregnancy to run a highly powered RCT or even a case control study).

 

[PsyDr]

This may be my retirement project🙂

My retirement project is to create the Isle of Unethical Research. It's like a Dr. Moreau situation, without the murder and allegorical comparison of colonialism.

At least in our field it's not a pay to publish operation. In some other fields, authors have to pay for the privilege.

Payment in time is still payment. But I’m a hypocrite, with over 5k hrs in free work over the last 3 years.

 

[Ollie123]

I definitely agree that pressure to publish increases the signal-to-noise ratio, but I also think its important to remember that a) science is iteriative, b) replication and expansion are important, and c) even very niche topics can matter clinically (for example, a friend was diagnosed with a semi-rare cancer while pregnant a few years ago, and it was nice that there was a decent body of case reports on maternal fetal medicine and parent/child outcomes with this cancer, even if there's not going to be enough cases of this cancer occuring during pregnancy to run a highly powered RCT or even a case control study).

100%

My concerns are certainly not with case studies of rare disorders, well-done replications or things of that nature. Just the poorly thought out "See, I correlated some variables!" projects with near-zero effort to advance any working theory or offer some framework for understanding psychopathology, human behavior or anything else. Great example is the preliminary data we get to support grant applications. There's no reason to publish a tiny mturk study we banged out in a week using a measure we made up on the fly just to appease an imagined reviewer concern that one of our purported mechanisms in a clinical trial wasn't related to the outcome. Yet we do, largely because reviewers expect it. We know we shouldn't infer effect size from an underpowered trial....yet we do and publish accordingly rather than simply waiting and running the fully powered trial where you can actually legitimately draw some inferences about things people care about (does this treatment work) rather than things they don't (can we recruit enough patients with disorder X from our clinic or do we need to run multisite). WTF do we need protocol papers for if its registered on clinicaltrials.gov and we all just agree that in the spirit of open science we'll send our protocol to anyone who asks. I cannot for the life of me figure out what purpose these serve.

Basically, I'd love if we could all collectively set the bar it "Does this help other people" rather than "Does this help me/my career" when making decisions about what to write up, but I recognize that's just not how things work now.