Last Friday eLife Editor-in-Chief, Randy Schekman participated in a live tweetchat with campaigner and bestselling author of Bad Pharma and Bad Science, Ben Goldacre.
Ben kicked off the discussion with Randy's Guardian article and then proposed that the structure of the academic system meant that some students and postdocs don't feel able to embrace new and innovative publishing models. Randy agreed and suggested that this is an issue that needs to be addressed at the level of review committees and academic departments.
In a discussion surrounding the identification of high quality science, Randy shared his view that there is really no reliable shortcut, the best option available is to read the work.
One of theshortcuts often used to judge the importance of academic work is the impact factor of the journal it's published in, a tool never intended to be a measure of the quality of individual research papers. Ben asked;
The chat took on a number of other important topics, including the All Trials campaign which champions the need for the results of all clinical trials to be reported (of which eLife is a signatory).
We've created a Storify of the entire #BenandRandy exchange (or as near as we could get to entire, there were a lot of tweets!) - along with comments from some of our/ Ben's followers and replies from Randy and Ben.
We're very pleased with the amount of people who have joined in with our discussions/ started discussions of their own surrounding these issues, if you'd like to keep in touch with us and be notified of any future discussions, you can sign up to our mailing list.
