For sure. But it would be easy for them to not research or publish things, I’m sure they’d get more favourable treatment and funding or whatever. It gives me hope. I don’t know enough about the history of the lancet or its editors to know why this stuff makes it through.
I don’t know specifics about the Lancet, but academic journals are decentralized. Anybody doing impactful research relevant to the foci of the journal can be published in the journal, so any researcher can submit manuscripts. This means that the editor doesn’t tell people what they can and can’t research, but they do exercise a degree of control over what research gets published. For the prestige of the journal, it would make sense for them to publish anything that the editor thinks will make a big splash–after undergoing peer review.
So Step 1: the editor either desk rejects an article or sends it out for review.
Step 2: the journal has a pool of decentralized researchers’ contact information. These are usually people who have already published in that journal, as well as the eminent scholars in various sub-fields. The editor might not be a specialist in microbiology, but they have a list of a dozen respected and well-published experts. They reach out until they have three of these experts as (unpaid) reviewers, whose identities are publicly kept anonymous. (Researchers agree because this is usually seen to be a service to your field.)
At this point, three researchers with expertise the closest to the content of the article manuscript in review are sent an anonymized copy. They (theoretically) don’t know who wrote it or what lab it came from, so this minimizes initial biases. They comb through the manuscript draft, looking to make sure the science is sound and the conclusions are accurate. They send their feedback to the editor, who anonymizes it and sends it to the manuscript author(s). At this point, the paper can be rejected for unsound science, or the authors will (typically) have to make minor revisions for clarity. If they aufficiently address the remarks of the reviewers, as determined by the editor, the paper gets published.
The Lancet probably pays its editors, though many journals don’t, and a common compensation practice is that the journal pays the university to lighten a professor’s teaching load by one course. The usual capital incentives are not present, and the actors involved in the publication steps are usually ideologically in line with ethical scientific process. Note too, that the editor is usually a professor employed at a university; they owe no deep allegiance to the Lancet as a publication, but see their role as a gatekeeper of the validity of the research in their field.
As researchers in the US are typically affiliated with universities, the journal will not play a negative role in their employment (though researchers must keep publishing to keep their jobs). Most labs receive a mixture of funding: directly from the university, donations made to specific labs, external grants from various sources (governmental and NGO typically, though also through private companies with an interest in particular research). This diversity in funding sources means that there are multiple avenues for labs to get funding. (Note that this is not true for all fields, though areas of research with medical implications have lots of money flowing.)
As for the researcher’s job, assuming they are a tenure-track professor, there are similar mechanisms in place. The tenure process typically involves the home university soliciting the professional opinions of the person’s department chair, in-department colleagues, students, and external researchers in the same field. A hefty tenure portfolio is produced wherein the researcher narratively justifies the relevance and impact of their research, which is then corroborated with, especially, the external reviewers’ close examinations of the research.
Each of these processes serves to diffuse the power across a group of people, and tenure track faculty often have a lot of contractual, codified protections from enployer retaliation for their research.
Tldr: the people who do the work of scientific publishing are not paid by the journal, so the journal as a capitalist publication does not have the same methods of controling what researchers publish
Science, much like the world it examines, has a left wing bias.
For sure. But it would be easy for them to not research or publish things, I’m sure they’d get more favourable treatment and funding or whatever. It gives me hope. I don’t know enough about the history of the lancet or its editors to know why this stuff makes it through.
I don’t know specifics about the Lancet, but academic journals are decentralized. Anybody doing impactful research relevant to the foci of the journal can be published in the journal, so any researcher can submit manuscripts. This means that the editor doesn’t tell people what they can and can’t research, but they do exercise a degree of control over what research gets published. For the prestige of the journal, it would make sense for them to publish anything that the editor thinks will make a big splash–after undergoing peer review.
So Step 1: the editor either desk rejects an article or sends it out for review.
Step 2: the journal has a pool of decentralized researchers’ contact information. These are usually people who have already published in that journal, as well as the eminent scholars in various sub-fields. The editor might not be a specialist in microbiology, but they have a list of a dozen respected and well-published experts. They reach out until they have three of these experts as (unpaid) reviewers, whose identities are publicly kept anonymous. (Researchers agree because this is usually seen to be a service to your field.)
At this point, three researchers with expertise the closest to the content of the article manuscript in review are sent an anonymized copy. They (theoretically) don’t know who wrote it or what lab it came from, so this minimizes initial biases. They comb through the manuscript draft, looking to make sure the science is sound and the conclusions are accurate. They send their feedback to the editor, who anonymizes it and sends it to the manuscript author(s). At this point, the paper can be rejected for unsound science, or the authors will (typically) have to make minor revisions for clarity. If they aufficiently address the remarks of the reviewers, as determined by the editor, the paper gets published.
The Lancet probably pays its editors, though many journals don’t, and a common compensation practice is that the journal pays the university to lighten a professor’s teaching load by one course. The usual capital incentives are not present, and the actors involved in the publication steps are usually ideologically in line with ethical scientific process. Note too, that the editor is usually a professor employed at a university; they owe no deep allegiance to the Lancet as a publication, but see their role as a gatekeeper of the validity of the research in their field.
As researchers in the US are typically affiliated with universities, the journal will not play a negative role in their employment (though researchers must keep publishing to keep their jobs). Most labs receive a mixture of funding: directly from the university, donations made to specific labs, external grants from various sources (governmental and NGO typically, though also through private companies with an interest in particular research). This diversity in funding sources means that there are multiple avenues for labs to get funding. (Note that this is not true for all fields, though areas of research with medical implications have lots of money flowing.)
As for the researcher’s job, assuming they are a tenure-track professor, there are similar mechanisms in place. The tenure process typically involves the home university soliciting the professional opinions of the person’s department chair, in-department colleagues, students, and external researchers in the same field. A hefty tenure portfolio is produced wherein the researcher narratively justifies the relevance and impact of their research, which is then corroborated with, especially, the external reviewers’ close examinations of the research.
Each of these processes serves to diffuse the power across a group of people, and tenure track faculty often have a lot of contractual, codified protections from enployer retaliation for their research.
Tldr: the people who do the work of scientific publishing are not paid by the journal, so the journal as a capitalist publication does not have the same methods of controling what researchers publish