Does biorXiv have different rules for different scientists?

Last year, I submitted a preprint to biorXiv. I was underwhelmed by the experience.

But I am a great believer in the saying, “Never try something once and say, ‘It did not work.’” (Sometimes attributed to Thomas Edison, I think.) I submitted another manuscript over the weekend which I thought might be a little more suited to preprinting, so after I submitted it to the journal, I went and uploaded it to biorXiv. It was the weekend, so it sat until Monday. Today, I received a reply. My preprint was rejected.

bioRxiv is intended for the posting of research papers, not commentaries(.)

How interesting.

I like that this demonstrates that preprint servers are not a “dumping ground” where anyone can slap up any old thing.

My paper is not a research paper. I don’t deny that. Following that rule, biorXiv made a perfectly understandable decision.

But the whole reason I thought this new paper might be appropriate to send to biorXiv was I had seen papers like “Transparency in authors’ contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication” on the site before. I opened up that PDF and looked at it again. There’s no “Methods” section. There’s no graphs of data. There’s no data that I can find at all.

How is that a research paper? And how is that not a commentary? Maybe I’m missing something.

But although the paper above doesn’t have data, what it does have is a lead author who was the former editor-in-chief of Science and current current president of the National Academy of Science of the US, Marcia McNutt. The paper was submitted in May 2017, some time after McNutt became president of the National Academy in 2016.

And while she is the only one to have “National Academy of Sciences” listed in the authors’ affiliations, the rest of the author list is nothing to sneeze at. It boasts other people with “famous scientist” credentials, like Nobel laureate and eLife editor Randy Schekman. Most of the authors are involved in big science journals.

One of my criticisms of preprints is that they would make the Matthew Effect for publication worse. People who are in well-known labs at well-known institutions would receive the lion’s share of attention. People who are not would have just another expectation with minimal benefits.

But this feels even worse. This feels like there’s one set of rules for the rank and file scientists (“No commentaries!”) and another set of rules for scientists with name recognition (“Why yes, we’d love to have your commentary.”).

I like the idea of preprints, but this is leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

Update, 12 June 2018: The manuscript found a home at a different preprint server, Peer Preprints.

Related posts

A pre-print experiment: will anyone notice?
A pre-print experiment, continued

External links

Twitter thread
Transparency in authors' contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication