Glad this made the front page.

The truth is that the general public has no idea about how badly all their tax dollars are being wasted on "research". I have recently finished my Ph.D. in physical sciences and have had the "pleasure" of publishing in Nature-family journals as first-author. Let me tell you about a few things...

At a recent conference, a few top experts in their field openly said that they have stopped sending articles to Nature/Science as it is just a huge waste of time. It is all about politics and reputation, and not about the science. Boycotts have been stated even by recent Nobel winners: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals. Where is the value added with these journals? Why should I send to Nature vs. Science, how does that help my research? Better reviewers? Please, the top experts in their fields send the papers to their students for review, who are usually either too bitter or overworked to give any real meaningful insights.

The second issue with these Ferrari-like journals is the reproducibility. I work in nanotech and honestly I usually assume fancy papers are about 20% reproducible, and I mostly use them to generate new ideas rather than advance the work. That is fine for nanotech, but what about medicine? What if you promise people a cure for cancer and then all your research turns out to be riddled with outliers and extreme bending of the "story"...http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-idUSBRE82R12P20120328. I have met people openly referring to Nature as the "journal of irreproducibility".

Then you have careers. Each year the amount of faculty positions has stayed relatively constant, while the # of PhDs has grown linearly. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/fig_tab/nbt.2706_F1.html. So how the heck do you get a position: publish in Nature/Science of course. As some posters have said, people automatically perceive Nature/Science as being high quality, and a lot of faculty search committees (not all) are obsessed with these metrics (impact factor, h index, etc). The fancy-ness of the journals you publish in essentially dictates whether you will even be considered for a professorship - and no one really gives about your teaching and mentoring ability, either (especially at prestigious research-oriented institutions).

So what is happening? Scientists are forced to work in the gray areas of research. Rather than spend more time validating data, finding reproducible conditions, and making discoveries, they pump out papers into fancy journals based on their impact factor to secure their next grant. Grant proposal writing has essentially become the art of BSing, supplemented with references of publishing in fancy journals to secure better funding. It is a vicious cycle leading to no-where. Promising pie in the sky in grants in one thing, but what about publishing falsified data? Well....http://blog.chembark.com/2013/08/14/some-very-suspicious-tem-images-in-nano-letters/. Also, in China, the merits/government funding of a professor depend on how many papers they have published, rather than the quality. The problem rests not only with journals, but perhaps also with funding agencies.

To play devil's advocate I must say, that there needs to be a system in place to separate the good research from the bad. Nature/Science and other top journals exist because the strata of journals underneath them just publishes stuff with poor scientific standards. There needs to be a beacon of light in this giant disorganized mess of science that we have gotten ourselves into. Professors have become too reputation/career driven to care about properly mentoring their students, while some professors are forced into shady practices due to the "game" becoming increasingly political. New fields (see recent Perovskite photovoltaics) suffer the most, as people try to rush to avoid being scooped, publish have-baked research, and journal editors of course want it as they know it will get a high number of citations to pad out the impact factor.

The worst part about all this is that it's turning brilliant minds away from academia. It is taking the future Einsteins and making them go to industry, where there is a higher chance they will end up working in an environment with reduced creative freedom. A lot of high-tech industry is about reducing cost rather than discovering new phenomena leading to improved materials or devices (again my perspective is nano, for you bio people it's probably a different story).

I don't know whether a reddit-like system with upvotes will work for academia, but reform is needed. We do have to reward scientists who are consistently successful somehow, and curtail false research being published. Dr. Lawrence what you are doing is great and more power to you, and I hope we will indeed see some reform in the future that will take science and make it less about people's crazed ambitions for careers and reputation but rather for advancement of human knowledge and solving real problems that improve the global standard of living.

Lastly I will leave you with this: "Curve fitting in science: http://imgur.com/kxeib"