Written Evidence Submitted by Harrington

(RRE0001)

Summary

Scientific journals make science worse by:

• making research much less transparent than it should be
• making science less accessible to both academics and the general public who often fund the research
• wasting billions by locking paper behind paywalls and/or absurdly high “open-access” fees
• cultivating a “publish or perish” culture that incentivises quantity over quality in publications

Instead of wasting the time of scientist and the money of funders I propose taking a fraction of what is currently spend on publication fees each year and establishing a single website where all research must be published to. This site would give papers a reproducibility score based on simple criteria such as:

• has the raw experimental data been included

• has the code for data analysis been included

• has the paper itself been written in a plain text (LaTeX, RMarkdown, Jupyter notebook, etc)

Research institutions could contribute part or all of the server infrastructure to host this site as it would be vastly cheaper for them then paying current exploitative journal subscription fees. Funding bodies would then be able to easily see how transparent a given scientist and their institution is, and award grants accordingly to incentivise engagement. To further increase transparency peer review should be publicly available, and all revision of a paper would also be made available. To increase the amount peer review scientists could be required to review as many papers as they have authors on their each of their publications.

Links to further reading of relevance

• None of the hundreds of machine learning Covid-19 papers are suitable for clinical use due to methodological flaws and/or underlying biases

• The natural selection of bad science

• Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

• The Sovereign of Science

            Scientists are not incentivised to produce quality research

• How might science be done better?

            Exploration of ideas to improve transparency and reproducibility

(July 2021)