I’ve just sent the fast-track protest letter with our original list of 18 authors to the several journals that charge a fee to fast-track. I believe their policy imperils the fairness of the scientific publication system. I’m sure we’ll need more support to convince some of these journals to discontinue their unsavory policy, so please add your name to the signatories here I’ll soon be linking to the responses we receive from the journals.

At least seven academic journals now offer preferential treatment for a fee—see the table at bottom. The journals describe this as a “fast-track” service that simply speeds things up. Even if that were all it was, this is an unwelcome development, as it means scientists from poorer countries or with poor funding will fall further behind their rich counterparts, whose publications can now leapfrog over the others.

I recently learned that a journal called Obesity Reviews has a “Fast Track Facility”: This is a terrible development for academia. It creates a two-tier system, wherein scientists who are well-funded such as those from rich countries now have an unfair advantage over those who don’t. Science traditionally has been a partial refuge from the injustice of rich vs. poor.

Previously, the Australian Research Council (ARC) expressly forbade use of grant funds to pay publication charges. This prevented many of us from publishing in open-access journals, as they generally charge a fee. Fortunately, the newly-revised funding rules change that, and instead strongly encourage open access, via journals and via depositing one’s research in an institutional repository. Hooray!

A new article in the New York Times regarding the allegations against Marc Hauser illustrate how difficult it is to determine whether one is guilty of scientific fraud. A main problem is that record-keeping standards are so lax. This is another reason why open science is important. Open science involves releasing original data and analyses, which is much easier if you have been keeping good records along the way.

This is open-access week. Most already know they should be publishing in open-access journals and/or self-archiving their papers. But moving science towards open access has been… slow. I was going to write that things have been moving at a glacial pace, thinking that would be an exaggeration; but nowadays I worry the world’s glaciers may be moving/melting fast enough to be gone before open access is the norm.

When a scientific article is published, ideally the data behind the reported results should be made available. Anyone should be able to scrutinize the basis of scientific claims. While this has long been the ideal, it has rarely been practiced. But this has been changing, and momentum is building to actually require the posting of data in circumstances where it’s feasible.

I have argued before that scientists must do more to make available the original data behind their articles. Any scientific claim should ideally be verifiable, via scrutiny of the original evidence. Currently, the vast majority of scientists never share their data.

More and more researchers agree that more access is needed to the original data behind published research articles. Of course, the more general point is that not just the original data, but all materials needed to scrutinize the claims of a manuscript should be available.

First were the Climategate emails. There, Lack of transparency in climate data analyses and climate models contributed to the doubts of skeptics regarding climate change, and made it easier for the skeptics to convince the public that there is good reason for skepticism. Now, the Marc Hauser affair has cast a shadow across another sub-area of science. How can we prevent these scientific fiascos from occurring in the future?