Raf Guns
Jeroen Bosman2 weeks ago an Australian researcher published (https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04061-w) a commitment to half his paper production (ironically in Nature, the flagship journal of a publisher that thrives on volume, metrics and publication addiction, but OK, this is where relevant audience is ;-). I do like his commitment, but still he's doing not doing himself justice and the real motivation is unclear. The reasoning is a bit to straightforward. Let's unpack. 1/n
2/n There are many outcries that there are way too many scholarly articles. People quote rising article numbers in PubMed (as if science consists only of biomedicine, but OK, that's not the issue here). In my view it;'s not about absolute numbers but about quality and sustainability. Having double the current number of articles is great, as there are many question and issues that deserve to be studied more. 2/n
3/n For findability and keeping up it there is no big difference between 10 or 20 million articles per year. It would actually be nice if there are 10 articles exactly on my topic/question instead of 2 and then 50 others where it's treated only in passing, from a perspective not valid for me or in a context not relevant to me. As long as we have good indexing and full text search sheer numbers are not an issue.
4/n Of course there is a condition: publication numbers are no issue as long as the research all the articles report on is good and relevant and the process with which they are produced is not harmful, wasteful or unsustainable. I wonder if the author of the piece would say that half of his articles actually would fail on one or more of these criteria. If not, it would be a real shame to miss out of those papers.
5/n Good here would mean *as many* of: reproducible, sound, robust, clear, equitable, honest, transparent, open, detailed, responsible. Relevant would mean *any* of new, filling replication needs, connecting views/issues, curating, consolidating, implementing, tied to real world issues and questions, solving uncertainties and more.
6/n Not being harmful would mean being honest and fair to co-authors, research subjects, readers, data, as well as one's own and one's team's mental health. Avoiding waste means sharing data, code etc., reusing data, avoiding animal testing, avoiding human survey fatigue, not duplicating efforts, looking for collaboration rather that rat race competitions, especially when using public money.
7/n Very relevant is this discussion is the sustainability of the publication system. So the publication behaviour should not drain the publication system's ability to review, verify, correct, comment, curate, translate, teach on, discuss etc. Time spent on primary publication should be balanced with all these other (community) tasks.
8/8 And that brings me to my main point: it is sad that apparently the author feels that all research time should be accounted to published (primary) articles, whereas it would be more sane to be able to explicitly justify all those other activities as valid and valuable outputs and research time well spent. The author is right to look at funders and institutions. If they and their career criteria only look at articles they are harming science and the people in it.
Esther de Groot@jeroenbosman I agree. Not easily achieved though.
Egon Willigh☮gen 🟥@jeroenbosman lousy start. This could have been a blog post
@egonw haha, hold your horses ;-)