I recently published the below chart to document the outrageous profit margins of scholarly publishers in the sciences. This post is to provide the sources for the numbers in the chart.

Scientists of all sorts increasingly recognize the existence of systemic problems in science, and that as a consequence of these problems we cannot trust the results we read in journal articles. One of the biggest problems is the file-drawer problem. Indeed, it is mostly as a consequence of the file-drawer problem that in many areas most published findings are false. Consider cancer preclinical bench research, just as an example.

How many of these laws do you know? The top 15, listed below, are based on psychology journal articles 1900-1999, as calculated by Teigen (2002): LAW  (REFERENCE)

Most academics agree that most scientific articles should be freely available, but we’re stuck in a system where scientific articles still tend to be submitted to journals that one needs a subscription to read. One way we researchers perpetuate this system is by donating our labor to provide “peer review” of manuscripts that will require others to pay hefty subscription fees to read.

For Open Access Week 2011, which starts today, I’ve made a video, a draft pledging website, an inspirational website, am giving a talk, and co-written a group letter. This post is about the letter. As discussed in my last post, there’s a web-based course called “Responsible Conduct of Research” that many thousands of researchers are required to complete each year.

Bradley Voytek spotted a disturbing question in an official “Responsible Conduct of Research” training program: This defense of the status quo has no place in a “Responsible Conduct of Research” training program. It reads like the old guard self-interestedly maintaining the current system by foisting unjustified beliefs onto young researchers!

Academic publishing is stuck in an outmoded system. Most scientific research is paid for by government and non-profit university funds, but high-profit corporate publishers often control access to the results of the research. In this video, we showcased the absurdity of the situation and also pointed towards how to get ourselves un-stuck. There are significant costs associated with what journal publishers do, so we need publishers in some form.

We (Hal Pashler, UCSD, hpashler at gmail and Alex Holcombe) are developing web-based software to help people interested in a scientific issue represent and inspect multiple competing hypotheses and the evidence which supports or fails to support each hypothesis.

The transmission of new scientific ideas and knowledge is needlessly slow: Flow slower Solution Journal subscription fees Open access mandates Competition to be first-to-publish motivates secrecy Open Science mandates Jargon Increase science communication;

How can we reduce the ability of publishers to charge exorbitant fees to read articles we give them for free? This situation drains university budgets and prevents public access to scientific information. One of many things we can do is referee manuscripts only for open-access journals. Another is to only publish in open-access journals. I’m trying to organize some kind of group pledge to make a stand on one of these or both.