FEBS Letters Editorial Office, Cambridge, UK.
FEBS Lett. 2024 Sep;598(18):2227-2239. doi: 10.1002/1873-3468.15018. Epub 2024 Sep 16.
Although publication in scholarly peer-reviewed journals remains the gold standard for communication of findings in the life sciences, the gold has been debased in the digital age by various impurities, including (a) reviewer fatigue, (b) fraud, paper mills, and the perils of artificial intelligence, (c) predatory journals, (d) the ongoing use of journal impact factor as a proxy for individual article quality, and (e) salami-slicing and other unethical practices. In this article, I present a detailed overview of these problems, as well as solutions proposed and implemented to counter them. Finally, I suggest that these are all symptomatic of a wider problem, namely the culture of 'publish or perish' and ongoing issues with how researcher performance is evaluated for grant, hiring, and promotion decisions. Only by working towards a global shift in the way scientists view the purpose of publication can we finally remove the impurities and refine the gold.
虽然在学术同行评议期刊上发表论文仍然是生命科学领域交流研究成果的黄金标准，但在数字时代，由于各种杂质的存在，这种“黄金”已经贬值，其中包括：(a) 审稿疲劳，(b) 欺诈、论文工厂和人工智能的危险，(c) 掠夺性期刊，(d) 继续使用期刊影响因子作为替代个体文章质量的指标，以及 (e) 切片和其他不道德的做法。在本文中，我详细介绍了这些问题，以及为解决这些问题而提出和实施的解决方案。最后，我认为这些都是更广泛问题的表现，即“要么发表，要么灭亡”的文化以及在为资助、招聘和晋升决策评估研究人员绩效方面持续存在的问题。只有通过努力在全球范围内改变科学家对出版目的的看法，我们才能最终去除杂质，提炼黄金。
