Clash of Confidence and Responsibility in Scientific Publishing

Abstract

Scientific publishing is a highly responsible enterprise that involves shared responsibilities between the authors and the publisher. It is based on mutual trust and on the principles of respect of freedom of expression of ideas. The author is responsible for the content of the article and for the truthfulness of the affirmations while the publisher verifies the formal coherency of the articles and is seldom engaged in the verification of the truthfulness of the original content. Publishing bad science is damaging to the scientific community and society as a whole. It has been shown that there are scientific journals that publish without much control over the form and content of the papers. Such journals usually have low impact on the scientific community. Damage that is made by publishing bad papers and bad research in an unimportant journal is small in comparison to the damage that may be and is often produced if the article is well written but contains trivial results and unsound conclusions and yet is published in a journal of high reputation. Some measures are proposed that could, by improving the reviewing procedure, also affect the quality of the publishing of science. It would also help if, when judging the scientific value of an article, the scientific community were to pay less attention to the fame of a journal or to various quality indicators, but consider more directly the quality of the research itself.