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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Hypocrisy of scientific journals

I dont want to sound like a bitter dejected negative person, however, this has been my un-biased view of publication policies of some of the well known prestigious journals.

When I consider publishing somewhere I quickly browse and get to the section where it lists the publication cost. While the cost of publication is usually very high, they do have sometimes concession for List A and List B countries which is economically un-developed. In both the lists you will not find India there, so that means we have to pay the full publication cost! But you open a news paper in any of the western countries or just see the economic rating given to India by wetern raters and it is always in the junk level. So, why this hypocrisy? On one hand you want to rate India way below many developing countries, and on the other hand you consider India to be considerably developed to pay the full publication fee...

My experiences with pre-publication inquiry to some of the journals that I published before (when I was in US) is also very alarming. The same paper will get published if sent by an US lab, but a lab from India will face rejection at the pre-publication inquiry stage itself. I am wondering if anyone else has noticed this. But we dont want this to deter us from publishing good articles. We will rise above the cloud and publish our work in higher journals.

1 comment:

  1. yea true mam but rejections are good, so far it motivated me to work in a efficient manner with the quality work, so that they cannot say no to that paper, i learnt from the NCBI genbank rejection, Genome announ rejection we are learning the things in a very hard way

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