Scientists like to complain about the current publishing model. Too few journals wield too much power over the careers of scientists. Journals cost too much money. The list goes on.

The editors of Nature Medicine have proposed a solution I’ve not heard of yet, and needless to say, it seems a little controversial:

Throughout your career, you’d only be allowed to publish 20 papers. What do you think of that?

Here are their arguments, outlined in their latest editorial:

If we adopted this model, many articles reporting incremental advances would no longer be written, and many specialized journals would disappear. And with far fewer papers to read, each one reporting a much more complete piece of research, search committees or funding bodies could directly evaluate the work of a given scientist, instead of (as is often the case) leaning on surrogate indicators such as a journal’s impact factor or number of citations.

At the extreme, we might not even need journals (and editors) anymore; everything would be published in preprint servers like those used by physicists, and the community would simply evaluate and rank the different contributions as they become available. This way, the whole community could act as reviewers, doing away with the existing peer-review process. This is somewhat reminiscent of what some websites are already trying to do, so far with limited success. But if everybody agreed to publish just 20 papers to keep the size of the literature manageable, then the journal of the future might conceivably be a preprint server.

Thoughts?

Incidentally, check out one of the latest groups formed on Nature Network about biosciences publishing. Join it to talk about the future of scientific publishing and what changes need to be made. This dovetails a conference about scientific publishing happening at Harvard Medical School next month. Several of us from Nature will be there.