Indexing the indices: scientific publishing needs to undergo a revolution.

Sylvain Delzon (1) , Hervé H. Cochard (2) , Sebastian Pfautsch (3)

1 BioGeCo - Biodiversité, Gènes & Communautés
2 PIAF - Laboratoire de Physique et Physiologie Intégratives de l'Arbre Fruitier et Forestier
3 HIE - Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment [Richmond]

Funders, institutions and journals should challenge the tyranny of metrics. Editors of international scientific journals find it more and more difficult to locate reviewers that are willing to evaluate manuscripts prior to publication (called ‘peer-review’). The most experienced researchers, best qualified to undertake these evaluations, increasingly decline peer-review requests, either because they do not have time or because they have reviewed so many manuscripts that they have become weary of the task. As a result, editors often have to call upon less experienced researchers or scientists, increasingly from more distant fields, often to the detriment of the quality of the review. So how did we arrive at this impasse, and what can we do to resolve it? The stakes are high, because the reputation of the whole peer-review system used in scientific publishing could be damaged in the long term.

Mots clés: Scientific edition; open access; Impact factor; metrics

Domaines: Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Sylvain Delzon, Hervé H. Cochard, Sebastian Pfautsch. Indexing the indices: scientific publishing needs to undergo a revolution.. Journal of Plant Hydraulics, 2016, 3 (e-009), pp.e009. ⟨10.20870/jph.2016.e009⟩. ⟨hal-01438782⟩