How should medical science change?

Comment published in The Lancet, 18 January 2014

"In December, 2013, Randy Schekman received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his codiscovery (with James Rothman and Thomas Südhof) of the cellular machinery regulating vesicle traffic. He used the occasion to launch a ferocious attack against what he called “luxury journals”—Nature, Science, and Cell. (See link below). Although he didn't mention The Lancet, JAMA, or The New England Journal of Medicine, it probably isn't unreasonable to think he would include us in his definition of “luxury journal”. 

This is what he wrote in The Guardian: “These luxury journals are supposed to be the epitome of quality, publishing only the best research. Because funding and appointment panels often use place of publication as a proxy for quality of science, appearing in these titles often leads to grants and professorships. But the big journals' reputations are only partly warranted. While they publish many outstanding papers, they do not publish only outstanding papers. Neither are they the only publishers of outstanding research”
Schekman and his lab are now boycotting those luxury journals and he is encouraging other scientists to do the same.

There is clearly a strong feeling among many scientists, and not only Nobel Prize winners, that something has gone wrong with our system for assessing the quality of scientific research. Does the fault lie with myopic university administrations led astray by perverse incentives or with journals that put profit and publicity above quality? The likely answer is that it is a mix of both. But perhaps the discussion provoked by the latest Nobel awards needs to be widened still further. Perhaps all of us engaged in the enterprise we call “science” need to pause and reflect on the present state of what we do." - view rest of article in The Lancet here

Randy Schekman writing in The Guardian 9 December 2013