The eLife Story Continues — Evasions Seem the Best We Can Expect
The continued silence from major funders involved in the eLife-PubMed Central scandal is creating a noise all its own.
The continued silence from major funders involved in the eLife-PubMed Central scandal is creating a noise all its own.
The National Library of Medicine has a couple of powerful brands, but they’ve become conflated and compromised by poor brand management. Ultimately, their brand value is derived from the value of the MEDLINE brand, which may now be spread too thin.
Attacks — both overt and covert — from OA advocates and NIH/NLM phantoms come in the wake of the posts revealing how eLife and PubMed Central coordinated activities and kept secrets.
Conflicts of interest at PubMed Central have been mismanaged, and seem to have led to loading the National Advisory Committee with Wellcome representatives, among other things.
When PubMed Central expedited eLife, PeerJ wondered why. Emails within PMC suggest they were tempted to help PeerJ in the same way. They even talked with eLife about how to handle things.
Circumstantial evidence has become direct evidence — that eLife requested publication in PMC; that PMC collaborated with eLife; that PMC sought to conceal its preferential treatment; and that systems and processes at the NLM regarding PMC inclusion are unclear and open to abuse and misuse.
F1000 Research has confusing review and publication practices, and doesn’t call itself a journal, yet is now going to be indexed by PubMed — further eroding the PubMed brand.
Funders and governments are exerting their influence in scientific publishing through monetary and financial threats, and are willing to slow science in order to accomplish OA goals.
Why would free content be differentially accessed across versions of it, and across publications? A dive into PLoS data leads to a potentially reassuring answer.
What is the likely value of what PubMed Central is providing to eLife by publishing them free online, providing PubMed indexing without delay, and getting them into the market six months early?
More articles are published by PubMed Central at the behest of eLife. It seems taxpayer-funded publishing is just fine for this new group.
More information emerges about PubMed Central, its processes, its relationship with eLife, and its role as a technology provider. Overall, it looks like certain OA friends get special treatment, and the processes you think occur are often short-circuited and may not even be tracked.
Last week, PubMed Central became the primary and sole publisher of eLife content, putting its competition with publishers, its manipulation of PubMed indexing criteria, its competition with publishing technology companies, and its clear OA bias into stark relief.
While some hope that OA will create a more accessible literature, new data about NSF funding and some logical extrapolations suggest it may actually exacerbate the Matthew Effect, choking off opportunities to publish for those without the funding necessary.
A retraction study hits some familiar conceptual problems, and a proposed retraction index runs into a deeper issue.