Is “By Scientists” Bad?
Newer scientist-founded publishers have not acquitted themselves well
The recent track record isn’t stellar when it comes to the lefthand section of the tired old slogan, “By scientists, for scientists.” This bit of rhetoric has been used repeatedly and for well over a decade as a cudgel against professional business management of scholarly and scientific journals. It continues to be used today — in the titles of presentations, on publishing web sites, and on commercial web sites.
It’s implicit criticism is that “business people” are usurious, greedy, exploitative, and don’t understand the profound mission or goals of the publications ecosystem or whatever scientific initiative is being described. Only scientists and their superior intellects can do it right, so had an obligation to take it back.
The phrase appears first in a 1963 editorial in Science, of all places. It was either appropriated or reinvented anew — it’s pretty obvious wordplay — by various entities trying to disrupt scientific publishing in the 2000s.
One such scientist became infamous, and served as some foreshadowing for others.
In 2007, Srinubabu Gedela was 25 when he received the Young Scientist Award from the Human Proteome Organization. He had earned a PhD from an Indian university and worked as a post-doc at Stanford. In 2008, he would found OMICS Publishing Group, which would claim to publish more than 700 journals by 2015.
In March 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) won a motion for summary judgment against OMICS and its founder/CEO, Gedela. The FTC brought the action under Section 5 of the FTC Act, deceptive practices, in May 2018. The FTC levied its first charges against OMICS in 2016.
Gedela claimed the FTC complaints were “fake news,” and the FTC personnel were “illiterates.”
In the motion for summary judgment, the FTC was firm in its condemnation of OMICS and their publishing practices, which were enabled by the practice of charging authors to be published: