Why do people publish in Scientific Reports?

In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature, is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, the pointless abbreviating of author names and journal titles.

This is particularly odd when you consider the prices of the obvious alternative megajournals:

• PeerJ: $1,195 APC (or free if authors are members)
• PLOS ONE: $1,695 APC
• Scientific Reports: $1,870 APC

So to have your paper published in Scientific Reports costs 10% more than in PLOS ONE, or 56% more than in PeerJ; and results in an objectively worse product that slices the paper up and dumps chunks of it in the back lot, compresses and combines the illustrations, and messes up the narrative.

So why would anyone choose to publish in it?

Well, the answer is depressingly obvious. As a colleague once expressed it to me “until I have a more stable job I’ll need the highest IFs I can pull off to secure a position somewhere“.

It’s as simple as that. PeerJ‘s impact factor at the time of writing is 2.353; PLOS ONE‘s is ‎2.776; That of Scientic Reports is ‎4.525. And so, it in the idiotic world we live in, it’s better for an author’s career to pay more for a worse version of his article in Scientific Reports than it is to pay less for a better version in PeerJ or PLOS ONE. Because it looks better to have got into Scientific Reports.

BUT WAIT A MINUTE. These three journals are all “megajournals”. They all have the exact same editorial criteria, which is that they accept any paper that is scientifically sound. They make no judgement about novelty, perceived importance or likely significance of the work. They are all completely up front about this. It’s how they work.

In other words, “getting into” Scientific Reports instead of PeerJ says absolutely nothing about the quality of your work, only that you paid a bigger APC.

Can we agree it’s insane that our system rewards researchers for paying a bigger APC to get a less scientifically useful version of their work?

Let me say in closing that I intend absolutely no criticism of Daniel Vidal or his co-authors for placing their Spinophorosaurus posture paper in Scientific Reports. He is playing the ball where it lies. We live, apparently, in a world where spending an extra $675 and accepting a scientifically worse result is good for your career. I can’t criticise Daniel for doing what it takes to get on in that world.

The situation is in every respect analogous to the following: before you attend a job interview, you are told by a respected senior colleague that your chances of getting the post are higher if you are wearing designer clothing. So you take $675 and buy a super-expensive shirt with a prominent label. If you get the job, you’ll consider it as bargain.

But you will never have much respect for the search committee that judged you on such idiotic criteria.