Multiple publication and plagiarism in economics journals

An unusual insight into the culture of academic publication comes in a recently published letter from David Autor, the editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives to a famous economist who published an article there that was substantively identical to papers he had published elsewhere.

David Autor writes:
"...There is a very substantial overlap between these articles and your JEP publication. Indeed, to my eye, they are substantively identical. Based on discussions with the editors of these journals, we have confirmed that the JEBO article was in press and the R&S article under review while your article was under revision for JEP. At the time we accepted your paper for JEP, we could not readily have learned of these two overlapping articles since they were at the time unpublished. Further obscuring the links among these articles is the fact that none of your four articles cites any of the other three. Had you chosen to inform us of the JEBO and R&S articles prior to the publication of your JEP article, we would of course have no grounds for complaint. In that case, however, we would not have published your article.

"We view your publication of this substantive material in multiple journals simultaneously as a violation of the spirit of the editorial agreement with American Economic Association that you signed in the winter of 2010, which states "The Author(s) warrant(s) that the above-named manuscript is his or her own original work of authorship and has not been published previously." The AEA does not intend to pursue legal action against you for violation of copyright. However, we find your conduct in this matter ethically dubious and disrespectful to the American Economic Association, the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the JEP's readers..."

The letter from Autor is followed by a letter of apology from the senior author of the papers in question, Zurich's Professor Bruno Frey.
"...It was a grave mistake on our part for which we deeply apologize..."
**********

RePEc maintains a plagiarism page on which it includes links to offending authors and some of the case material, including the present case.

Behavioral Economics in Management Science

Kathleen McGinn forwards the following announcement, a version of which also appears here:

Given the tremendous growth and importance of behavioral economics research and building on the success of our Behavioral Economics and Finance Special Issue (which is scheduled to appear in the January 2012 issue), we have created a new department in Management Science: 
Behavioral Economics
We provide below our editorial team, the editorial statement for the department and information about Management Science. You are receiving this email most likely because you have reviewed or submitted to Management Science.  Please pass on this information to all that may be interested. 

Department Editors:
Uri Gneezy, University of California, San Diego
Teck-Hua Ho, University of California, Berkeley
John List, University of Chicago

Associate Editors:
Nick Bloom,Stanford University
Colin Camerer, California Institute of Technology
Jeffrey Carpenter, Middlebury College
Gary Charness, University of California, Santa Barbara
Yan Chen,  University of Michigan
Anna Dreber,  Stockholm School of Economics
Simon Gaechter,   University of Nottingham
Stephan Meier,  Columbia University
Klaus Schmidt,  Univeristy of Munich
Andrew Schotter,  New York University
Uri Simonsohn,  University of Pennsylvania
Matthias Sutter,  University of Innsbruck
Chad Syverson,  University of Chicago
John van Reenen,  London School of Economics
Roberto Weber,   University of Zurich  

Editorial Statement:
The Behavioral Economics Department seeks to publish original research broadly related to behavioral economics. We welcome laboratory experiments, field studies, empirical and theoretical papers. The goal of the Department is to promote research on incentives and behavior in domains such as markets, groups and individual decision making.  In the cross-disciplinary tradition of Management Science, we encourage research that draws ideas from multiple disciplines including economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics to provide novel insights on behavioral economics.  In all cases, manuscripts should provide high quality original approaches to behavioral economics, should be motivated such that the importance of the results are clear to nonspecialists and have important managerial implications for business and public policy.

Law reviews and the declining cost of submission

Jacqueline Lipton at The Faculty Lounge has a post advising new law profs on Placing a First Law Review Article. Even though I've written about the different academic publishing cultures, and the fact that submissions to law reviews are made simultaneously to multiple reviews, I find the numbers of recommended submissions surprising...

"It appears that a number of people feel that Expresso has changed the game significantly in the sense that more people are sending more articles to more law reviews because of the speed and ease of doing it via Expresso.  Thus, the collective wisdom seems to be that a new professor may have to send an article to more reviews than would have been the case, say, 10 years ago when this was predominantly done through hard copy submissions.  I am interested in how others feel about this.  I guess back in the days of hard copy submissions, many of us were advised not to send an article out to more than maybe 70 or 80 general law reviews tops.  But a lot of junior folks today seem to be advised to send to at least 150.  The sense is that many of the top 100 law reviews now won't even look at a piece unless someone is trying to expedite up from a "lower ranked" journal. "

See my earlier post, Peer review and markets for ideas, in law and science

Games, a new online game theory journal

This announcement came in today's email.

Dear All,
The first issue of Games, dated March 2010, has been published and is available under http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/1/1/
This first issue shows that, contrary to generally accepted practices, quick but rigorous refereeing and quick publication are feasible also in game theory. Counting both accepted and rejected papers, the average time from submission to first editorial response is currently 34 days, i.e. under 5 weeks. Concentrating on ultimately accepted papers, the overall average time from submission to publication online is currently 61 days. For me,
more instructive that these numbers have been the anecdotes. For example, I was astonished to see that it is perfectly possible to get highly detailed referee reports on a 60‐page, mathematically dense paper within a few weeks, and from established referees. Another rewarding experience concerns the reaction of authors, as for example when I asked an author of an experimental paper to conduct a full‐scale replication, expecting the revision to take months, and received the revision including the replication in a few weeks. Reasonable speed appears to be contagious.
It seems that the editorial delays we have grown used to are just an established but highly inefficient convention‐‐‐nothing more. Still, transitions from an inefficient equilibrium to a more efficient one can be notoriously difficult to implement. The first (short) issue has been completed, and the first paper in issue 2 is
already out, but we are still a long way from establishing the journal and the associated quick refereeing process. For this, I would like to ask for your help.
What can you do for the journal? First, talk about it and encourage good researchers to submit, quoting the speed of the editorial process. Second, if you are not already doing it, consider editing a special issue (feel free to contact me with your proposals). Third, consider submitting your own work. Related to the last point, currently Games would especially welcome literature surveys in your respective fields; although of course they would be submitted to the same rigorous (but quick!) refereeing process as any other paper, feel free to propose a topic so that the scope can be discussed in advance.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support. Special thanks go to those who have already acted as referees and to the Guest Editors. I look forward to Issue 2!
Carlos Alós‐Ferrer
Editor‐in‐Chief, Games
‐‐
Frauke Muenzel, Managing Editor
Games Editorial Office
Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI)
Kandererstrasse 25, CH‐4057 Basel, Switzerland
Tel. +41 61 683 77 34
Fax +41 61 302 89 18
E‐mail: games@mdpi.org
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/games/

Peer review and markets for ideas, in law and science

Most scientific journals involve "peer review," where the peers in question are supposed to be experts on the subject of a particular submitted article. Because reviewers' time is scarce, the presumption is that a paper submitted to a peer reviewed journal is not currently being submitted anywhere else. The author submits the paper, and waits for a review (either a rejection, a revise-and-resubmit, or an acceptance). Depending on the field and the journal this can happen quickly, or (for economics journals) slowly.

Law Reviews are different. Authors submit to multiple journals simultaneously, and the papers are reviewed not by peers but by the third year law students who edit that year's edition of their law school's Review. And well-received authors don't get "acceptances" they get "offers" to publish, which typically have a short deadline, e.g. 24 hours. In that time they can contact one of the other law reviews to whom they have submitted the paper and try to get it accepted there.

For example, the submissions page of the University of Chicago Law Review has the following invitation to ask for an Expedited Review: "If you have received a formal offer of publication from another journal and would like to receive an expedited review by the University of Chicago Law Review, please contact us at lrarticles[at]law.uchicago.edu. When requesting an expedited review, please put "Expedite" as the subject of your email and include in the text:
1) The author name and title of your manuscript; 2) The name of the journal that has extended an offer to you; 3) The date that the offer expires; 4) The phone number or email address of a contact person at that journal;5) An electronic attachment of your article (plus C.V. or cover letter) to facilitate and accelerate the process. The University of Chicago Law Review will attempt to honor all requests for expedited review for which the above information is provided. ..."

But there is an experiment afoot to change the way law review articles are reviewed, and to try to have peer review while still allowing authors to submit to multiple journals simultaneously: Mainstream law review tries peer review

The idea is to have the reviews done first in a clearinghouse called the Peer Reviewed Scholarship Marketplace "The Peer Reviewed Scholarship Marketplace (“PRSM”), a consortium of student-edited legal journals, exists to provide student-editors with peer evaluations of legal-scholarship manuscripts and to assure the publication of quality articles. PRSM connects authors and journals with subject matter experts, who through their reviews provide editors with the information they need to make informed decisions regarding article selection. With PRSM, the future of legal-scholarship publishing has arrived."

"The Peer Reviewed Scholarship Marketplace (“PRSM”) began with the South Carolina Law Review’s Peer Review Pilot Program... Numerous authors submitted manuscripts to the South Carolina Law Review, and many other legal scholars and practitioners volunteered to serve as peer reviewers. Relying on the reviewers’ evaluations, the South Carolina Law Review chose three articles for publication in a special Peer Review Issue (Volume 60, Book 4). This special issue also featured a favorable foreword by Judge Richard A. Posner as well as an essay describing the South Carolina Law Review’s experience with peer review.
The Pilot Program’s success encouraged the creation of PRSM, a consortium of student-edited legal journals that believe that peer review can enhance the quality of the articles that journals select and ultimately publish. PRSM works much like the familiar manuscript submission vehicle ExpressO but with a peer review component. Authors submit their work exclusively to PRSM, whose administrators then arrange for double-blind peer review of each manuscript. After six weeks, PRSM members will receive a copy of the article with the reviews, which will assist the student-editors in publication decisions. As with ExpressO, members will make their own independent offers to authors, who are free to accept or decline. If an author is unsatisfied with all offers—or receives none after a designated date—he or she is free to resubmit his or her reviewed manuscript through ExpressO or another preferred vehicle.
PRSM thus benefits all parties: authors, reviewers, journals, and the legal community that relies on scholarship published in student-edited journals. All authors receive valuable feedback from their peers, and successfully placed authors further benefit from the “peer reviewed” certification of their published manuscripts. Reviewers are offered an opportunity to comment on new scholarship pertinent to their areas of expertise and thereby participate in the “gate-keeping” article selection process. Student-edited journals are given an additional tool to spot and select the most novel and valuable research for publication. Finally, PRSM’s peer review process produces higher quality scholarship for the legal community that reads and relies on the profession’s journals.
For more information about South Carolina Law Review’s experience with the Peer Review Pilot Program and creation of PRSM, go here."

Apparently law journals in the UK are more like economics journals than like American law reviews, in that authors can only submit to one journal at a time, and submissions are peer reviewed (see Comparative journal submission experiences by John Ip).

In the meantime, a peer-review holdout in the sciences is moving to peer review. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the journal published by the honorific society from which it takes its name, had a tradition of allowing NAS members to "communicate" papers without a refereeing process. For some time now that has coexisted with a peer review process; some papers are reviewed, others simply communicated. Next year that will come to an end, and all papers will be reviewed: PNAS will eliminate Communicated submissions in July 2010.

The problem is that communicated papers were apparently of very uneven quality. (Some biologists I know claim that PNAS stands for "post-Science and Nature," as papers are only sent there after being rejected by those two other journals.) And while there is a very sensible scientific tradition of simply ignoring bad papers, some of the ones that appeared were apparently embarassing: Peer Review Failure?

Peer review is undoubtedly a part of the answer to the larger question about why journals persist at all given the growth of the internet: Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?

The "Netflix for academic journals"

For those without comprehensive electronic access to journals through big university libraries, the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports The Netflix of Academic Journals Opens Shop

"By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone.
The Web site has been an academic-journal search engine since 2005 and unveiled its rental program this week. Now anyone can “rent” an article—which means you can view it on your computer without ownership rights or printing capabilities—for as little as 99 cents for 24 hours. Users can also subscribe for monthly passes. Currently the site has 30 million articles from various peer-reviewed journals.
William Park, chief executive of Deep Dyve, says the model will not only allow more people to read articles they might otherwise not see, but will actually encourage users to purchase more content from journals. He says that now, only about 0.2 percent of people visiting journal Web sites go on to buy articles, because they don’t know exactly what they are getting from just a title and an abstract.
“Nobody would buy a car without at least evaluating it first,” Mr. Park says. “The same is true for anything, whether it’s a dollar or $10,000.”
Mr. Park says that Deep Dyve has revenue-sharing partnerships with hundreds of publications (about 80 percent of which are scientific) and hopes to expand to more of the humanities within the coming months."

Rejecta Mathematica

Volume 1 number 1 of Rejecta Mathematica is out. It is a journal which publishes only papers that have been rejected by peer reviewed journals. Here is the inaugural letter from the editors:
"For those unfamiliar with our mission, Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences. In addition, every paper appearing in Rejecta Mathematica includes an open letter from its authors discussing the paper’s original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper, and stating the case for the paper’s value to the community. "

The marketplace for peer reviewed economics

Journals are the clearinghouses of academic economics, providing the proximate demand for the articles that economists supply. In my previous post (Science journals and science journalism) I discussed the fact that economics journals have a much longer delay between submission and publication than journals in science and medicine. Some of this has to do with the reviewing process.

Preston McAfee, a veteran editor, has written a wise and not so funny* article about the editing process, based on his long experience at the AER and, more recently, Economic Inquiry (where he initiated a policy of allowing authors to opt for an accept or reject decision without revision).

I recommend the article, even though it is difficult to summarize. It is not an apologia; he says:
"The way economists operate journals is perhaps the most inefficient operation I encounter on a regular basis."

*He also says "There is a lot of heartbreak in journal editing since most of the job is rejecting papers. If you are looking for amusing anecdotes, subscribe to Readers’ Digest."

Open access journals

To continue yesterday's discussion about the Market for ideas, academic journals present an interesting set of institutions. The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports on the open access journal movement: Physicists Set Plan in Motion to Change Publishing System (and, permanently, here for subscribers). The story concerns SCOAP3 - Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, which seeks to set up a non-profit organization that will fund cooperating journals.

"Here's the pitch. Libraries would stop paying for subscriptions to journals in high-energy physics. Instead, each library or government agency would pay a set amount every year to the new nonprofit group. Each journal publisher would then apply for a portion of that money, submitting a bid spelling out how much it would cost them to review, edit, and publish their articles that year (building in some profit as well). To win a bid, the journals would commit to publishing their articles free online for anyone to see."

"Several factors make high-energy physics an ideal field for this experiment. For one thing, it is a relatively small and tight-knit research area, where almost all major papers appear in just six journals. "

There are clearly obstacles in the path of this plan. But Arxiv, the physics/math working paper archive now hosted at Cornell, seems to have had somewhat more success than the similar effort in Economics at WUSTL, pioneered by Bob Parks, so it will bear watching.

(On the subject of working papers in economics, RePEc and SSRN have filled some of that space in economics, and there are a growing number of open access journals, among them Theoretical Economics.) See also Ted Bergstrom's Journal Pricing Page for a discussion of other proposals for redesigning the market for scientific publishing.