Honesty

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” Ten Commandments

The last issue of the year not surprisingly concurs with the Christmas season celebrated in the Christian parts of the world. Apart from the truly faithful, people usually never seen within 500 yards of a church suddenly don festive clothes, start looking deeply moved, and desperately try to remember the text of various hymns and prayers. Luckily there is a good chance that their neighbors in the pew will be struggling with the same problems. Cynics consider this behavior ritualized hypocrisy.

It is, therefore, apt to reflect a bit on one of the moral foundations of this religion, outlined in the famous Ten Commandments. In the Ninth Commandment (or Eighth, depending on which version of the scripture you use), it is asked that one “shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”. You must not lie—in an abbreviated version. Both in Judaism and Christianity, the Ten Commandments describe the fundamental principles on which the faithful community is to rely by defining various greatest obligations. These encompass God, the family, other people, property, social interaction, and the community. Thus, the greatest obligation to the community for a Jew or Christian is truthfulness. This is where scientific publishing comes in.

If science is regarded as the search for truth and for understanding how this world really functions, its publications should contain nothing but the truth. Everybody will, grinding their teeth, admit that this simple fact itself cannot be considered true anymore. The reasons for this sad situation, often also used as excuses by those who are still able to feel guilt, are manifold.

Publishing is a business and as such must earn a profit. This, in turn, can be done extremely efficiently—which can then be turned into a major argument against the publishers, blaming them of greed. Greed, by the way, is also covered in the Ten Commandments. Economic matters must not necessarily interfere with truthfulness but may hide it behind paywalls, seemingly obscuring it from public perception.

Publishing is a necessity for a scientific career, and rightly so. Overdoing it, however, results in the usual decline in quality. As it is problematic to reinvent the wheel every couple of years, a popular loophole is to reinvent different kinds of spokes, ball-bearings, etc. instead, and to publish these rather meagre findings in least publishable units spread across multiple journals. Major conclusion: wheels can look differently, but they are still wheels.

The increasingly moronic pressure on scientists to publish quantity rather than quality inevitably leads to the abuse of an originally sound system. Human inventiveness has always been at its best when designing deadly weapons or when finding ways of cheating. What's a couple of outlier measurements among friends? Just drop them and you get a better standard deviation. After all, you're only trying to help mankind to conquer aortic valve disease (or whatever).

If everything fails and when these stubborn, finnicky editors in their ivory towers keep bluntly refusing your ingenious patchwork study, there is always an Open Access journal willing to take it for a mere $1,000. Open Access, the “author pays” model, is currently heavily enforced by various European public funding agencies with their “Plan S.” This plan wants to make Open Access or institution-based preprinting compulsory by the beginning of 2020, an ambitious endeavor. As so often, it is an initiative based on well-founded considerations, but is prone to abuse, as can already be witnessed with all the predatory journals. The publishers, who have to reconsider their traditional publishing models, must educate the authors and the public about this new modality: “Better be wise and publish with someone you can trust—an established publishing house” should be the general direction.

It is hard to insist on the inviolability of truthfulness, not only in scientific publishing. There are simply too many “fake news” or “alternative facts” out there, happily spread by those who have millions of “followers,” not to be confused with “readers.” Misinformation has raised doubts in the public awareness about the alleged dangers of vaccinations or, most recently, the side effects of statins. Editors and publishers must now put things into a correct perspective again. Watch this space.

So, if you want to pray for something really important in your Christmas prayers, pray for the return of more honesty into scientific publishing or, better still, into this world in general. It is urgently needed.