I take the "haute couture" crack to be an analogy with big fashion houses: the weird stuff that comes down the runways costs a fortune and bears little relationship to anything anybody would actually wear, but it sets fashions for rich people and celebrities, which in turn influences the purchasing decisions of the regular folks. So the big fashion houses pump money into "high-end" fashions, even though they'll never see a profit even at $000s per item, because the real money is in the follow-on sweatshop crap they pump out at huge volume, low cost (and quality) and enormous markup even though it's relatively cheap.
We're supposed to get the idea that maybe PLoS Biology measures up to Nature standards, but the rest of the PLoS journals are Wal-Mart garbage that's just being sold to prop up the high end.
That may well be true of Nature's burgeoning stable of Nature Jr journals -- it certainly seems to be an established model among toll access publishers, just take a look at Elsevier's titles -- but it's plainly bullshit when it comes to PLoS, which only publishes six journals and employs demonstrably rigorous peer review for each of them. In the particular case of PLoS ONE, unlike any Nature journal, you can see for yourself the quality of the reviews.
neilfws
· 1 year ago
I don't know that PLoS ONE is intended to be the sole future journal. The PLoS journals serve different roles. PLoS ONE is for sound science, interesting enough to merit an audience but not necessarily ground-breakingly original. PLoS Biology in their own words is for "works of exceptional significance, originality, and relevance in all areas of biological science". PLoS Computational Biology has become the pre-eminent journal for bioinformatics/computational biology, upstaging Bioinformatics and BMC Bioinformatics in a very short time.
floatingnotes
· 1 year ago
@Neil: Yes, it is not clear what PLOS' intent is. I hope they will move towards a single repository with PLOS Biology or Computational Biology possibly still existing as a hotlist of interesting papers published in PLOS One; this hotlist could be expert-nominated, based on voting by expert subgroups, based on the opinion of professional editors, etc. Such a hotlist could even be constantly evolving.... My problem with maintaining elitist journals is: who decides what is ground-breakingly original ? And how many articles per year are allowed to call themselves ground-breakingly original ? Why create an elitist club with a few powerful gatekeepers ? Doesn't it make sense to just publish the articles, and then let people (Nature, Faculty of 1000, ScienceDaily, New York Times, Random Joe, PLOS, whoever) make their own constantly updated hotlists of what is ground-breakingly original ? I find that scientists have time and again proven themselves to be lazy when it comes to tedious, yet important career-decisions about others: using proxies like publication in PLOS Biology for scientific quality is all too tempting. Even if it is not true, the perception that this is the case exists. And I feel that this leads to a counter-productive and unhealthy attitude among scientists at all levels towards the science they do as a result of the unfairness of delegating judgements about scientific quality to a community of ex-scientist professional editors (most NO decisions at the glamor-mags are made by editors based on their own opinions, not based on the opinion of peer-reviewers).
Dr David Hill
· 7 months ago
Butler did a hatchet job on the World Innovation Foundation and made assumptions that looked as though the Foundation was something that was not in the public interest. He appears to have an aversion not to do a balanced job and where this is a clear sign of ulterior motives. Indeed, he gives one good comment for every ten bad comments. Another sign that he has other things on his mind. Most probably financial for himself and his publication. He is a very obnoxious person who comes over in basically a threatening manner if you ever have the horrible experience of being interviewed by him (sorry did I mean interogated). Really not a nice person inside I would say.
We are now taking Nature to task about the highly misleading article that Butler published in January 2008. Indeed we have started at the top with giving submissions to the holding company where Nature are a division. It is hoped that Butler eventually learns his lesson the hard way from this growing rebuff by the Foundation and when all this comes out in the international press and most probably the US and European Courts. His side kick Oliver Morton supports him in whatever Butler does and therefore is no better in giving support to a balanced article. That is of course when the knives are out for you and where PLoS has also suffered from this experience. In many ways therefore through this baptism of fire, we could say that we are now really like brothers with PLoS in many ways. Conscientious objectors at least.
Therefore good luck for the future of PLoS in their endeavours, but please PLoS do not upset Butler again. He does not like anything that is against his personal and company interests. You have been told so don't do it again or you will be very unpopular in certain previously stated circles. Nature thinks that it is big, but not that big when the world eventually fully learns about their unsavoury tactics and hidden agendas.
Dr David Hill World Innovation Foundation Charity Bern, Switzerland www.thewif.org.uk
All Comments
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/07/plos_...
We're supposed to get the idea that maybe PLoS Biology measures up to Nature standards, but the rest of the PLoS journals are Wal-Mart garbage that's just being sold to prop up the high end.
That may well be true of Nature's burgeoning stable of Nature Jr journals -- it certainly seems to be an established model among toll access publishers, just take a look at Elsevier's titles -- but it's plainly bullshit when it comes to PLoS, which only publishes six journals and employs demonstrably rigorous peer review for each of them. In the particular case of PLoS ONE, unlike any Nature journal, you can see for yourself the quality of the reviews.
We are now taking Nature to task about the highly misleading article that Butler published in January 2008. Indeed we have started at the top with giving submissions to the holding company where Nature are a division. It is hoped that Butler eventually learns his lesson the hard way from this growing rebuff by the Foundation and when all this comes out in the international press and most probably the US and European Courts. His side kick Oliver Morton supports him in whatever Butler does and therefore is no better in giving support to a balanced article. That is of course when the knives are out for you and where PLoS has also suffered from this experience. In many ways therefore through this baptism of fire, we could say that we are now really like brothers with PLoS in many ways. Conscientious objectors at least.
Therefore good luck for the future of PLoS in their endeavours, but please PLoS do not upset Butler again. He does not like anything that is against his personal and company interests. You have been told so don't do it again or you will be very unpopular in certain previously stated circles. Nature thinks that it is big, but not that big when the world eventually fully learns about their unsavoury tactics and hidden agendas.
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation Charity
Bern, Switzerland
www.thewif.org.uk