Opinion: In Publishing, Don’t Make the Perfect the Enemy of the Good

All members of the scientific community must commit to taking the risks needed to change how research is shared and evaluated.

Written byHilal A. Lashuel
| 5 min read
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For decades, researchers have complained that the publication and evaluation systems in academia are broken or need urgent reform. There have been calls for a more equitable system where scientists are evaluated based on the rigor, quality, significance, and impact of their work instead of their institutional affiliation and the impact factors of the journals where their research is published. On October 20, eLife, a peer-reviewed journal, announced new changes in their publishing policies that they claim will make this possible.

As of January 2023, eLife will no longer make acceptance or rejection decisions of papers that are submitted for publication. Instead, the journal will publish every paper that it sends out for review as a preprint, along with the peer reviewers’ comments and the journal’s editorial assessment of the work, which will highlight the significance of the research and the extent to which the evidence provided by the authors ...

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Meet the Author

  • Hilal A. Lashuel

    Professor Hilal A. Lashuel received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry from the City University of New York in 1994 and completed his doctoral studies at Texas A&M University and the Scripps Research Institute in 2000. After obtaining his doctoral degree, he joined the Picower Institute for Medical Research in Long Island New York as a research scientist. In 2001, he moved to Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a research fellow in the Center for Neurologic Diseases and was later promoted to an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School. In 2005 Prof. Lashuel moved Switzerland to join the Brain Mind Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL), where he is now an associate professor of neuroscience at the Institute of Bioengineering and the director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Chemical Biology of Neurodegeneration. Research in the Lashuel laboratory focuses on applying chemical biology approaches to elucidate the mechanisms of protein misfolding and aggregation and their contribution to neurodegenerative diseases. The ultimate goal of his research is to develop novel mechanism-based therapies and diagnostics for early intervention and monitoring of disease progression. His work is funded by Swiss, European, US funding agencies, private foundations (Michael J Fox Foundation, CHDI), and partnerships with Swiss and international biotech and pharmaceutical companies. 

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