It’s time to get off the hamster wheel

Metaphorically, the term “hamster wheel” describes a continuous, repetitive cycle in which a person feels trapped, often performing tedious or unfulfilling tasks without making meaningful progress.

I have been in academia for more than fifty years and one of the mantras of academia during that entire time has been “publish or perish”, which is taken to mean, success in academia is measured by publishing research papers in academic journals in order to document scientific success.

Over time, people recognized that not all publications had the same scientific value, and papers published in certain journals were more highly valued than papers published in “lesser” journals. This was mainly judged based on the reputation of a journal, often related to the reputation of the scientific society that managed the publication of the journal.

The metric trap: impact factors and commercial publishers

With the advent of computer technology that was able to track citations of papers in all, or most, of the journals published in a particular field, the notion of “impact factor” was developed based on metrics used to measure the importance and influence of a journal, based on the number of citations received by articles published by that journal over time. This tended to decrease the importance of journal societal affiliation on the reputation of a journal compared to the journal’s calculated impact factor. There are numerous flaws in the calculation of impact factors, one of which is that papers published in narrowly defined fields with relatively few scientists who publish and cite papers in that field will never have as many citations as papers published in more broader fields that are of interest to larger numbers of scientists.

The advent of impact factors gave rise to many “for-profit” scientific publishers that are not associated with scientific societies. These “for-profit” publications generally use similar “peer-review” mechanisms for screening and editing the papers that they publish. Those peer-review mechanisms often rely on free labor in the form of unpaid aca­demic scientists who do their work based on incentives provided by academia that reward scientists for contributions to “the system” of academic publishing (number of papers written, reviewed and edited listed in their personnel evaluations). This practice is a “hold-over” from the previous system of societal journal publishing in which scien­tists provided these services for the benefit of their chosen scientific societies. The same services provided to unaffiliated scientific journals is essentially servitude for the benefit of a commercial publisher.

The rise of predatory solicitations

The next level of nonsensical, bordering on unethical scientific publishing, are predatory journals. These are journals that solicit papers just so that they can fill their journals, collect page charges, provide quick reviews and rates of acceptance. They often have trick mechanisms to increase their impact factors. Often, they are not looking for good science. I can get several solicitations for papers in any week. A few of my favorite recent solicitations are:

It is often difficult to distinguish the legitimacy of papers published in these types of journals from legitimate peer-reviewed journals. It is clear that some of these journals don’t understand that scientific research often takes months, if not years of planning, and that it is not possible to carry out and write a legitimate research paper within a few weeks.

System at a breaking point and personal metrics

In addition to questions of legitimacy and the sheer number of publications that are being submitted and then sent through the peer-review process, it is clear that the current publications process in science is approaching a breaking point. This has led to increasing reports of AI being used to write, review and edit the scientific papers that are being submitted and processed. Some scientists now question the whole process of scientific publishing and the future of academic research.

With the advent of “impact factors” has come the personal “impact factors” (Google Scholar “H-indices”) that are now readily available as a measure of a scientist’s per­sonal “impact” on a field, further reducing the value of journal impact factors. Since a person’s H-index is based on how many times their papers have been cited in journals, regardless of journal impact factor, the incentives for selecting “high impact” journals has decreased.

The solution: reclaim publishing for scientific societies

One solution to addressing the impending problems emerging in the scientific publica­tions system (i.e., increasing performance of tedious and unfulfilling tasks without mak­ing meaningful progress in the publications process) is to avoid subservience to independent, non-society affiliated publishing outlets that increasingly demand service from academics for their own economic benefit. Publishing through member-run scientific society publications not only provides some value back to one’s scientific society in the form of income to the society, but it may also provide a mechanism for upholding scientific values in the publication process. At least authors can feel some satisfaction in supporting their society, rather than lining the pockets of robber barons when publishing their research.

There are numerous publishers of horticultural journals. Several of those journals are associated with horticultural societies, most often national societies. But some prominent ones are not and it can be difficult to sort them out. For instance, Scientia Horticulturae, which has a name that identifies with other publications of ISHS such as Acta Horticulturae, Chronica Horticulturae and Scripta Horticulturae, had its origins in ISHS but has not been affiliated with ISHS for several decades. Now it is under the exclusive control of a commercial publishing company. Similarly, Horticulturae is also not affiliated with ISHS and is an MDPI on-line publication.

Publishing with ISHS: introducing JISHS

The International Society for Horticultural Science has been publishing the European Journal of Horticultural Science (eJHS) for several years, but the title of the journal did not make it clear that the scientific content of the journal was managed by ISHS.

The renaming of the journal to the Journal of the International Society for Horticultural Science (JISHS) corrects that problem.

The ISHS Board encourages all members of the Society to consider publishing their research or review papers in JISHS.

• Member-managed quality: scientific content is curated and managed entirely by members of ISHS;
• Non-profit publishing partner: published in partnership with CABI (an inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization established by a United Nations treaty-level agreement between 48 member countries);
• Member royalties and benefits: ISHS receives royalties; ISHS member corresponding authors receive a 25% discount on APCs.