BLUNT criticism is part of the scientific process. And it doesn't get much blunter than this. In an article for the Guardian, Randy Schekman, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the 2013 crop of Nobel prize winners, announced that his lab will boycott "luxury" scientific journals, by which he means those commonly regarded as the most prestigious, such as Nature, Cell and Science. Dr Schekman:

These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept. The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called "impact factor" – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking.

Any scientist will tell you that Nature and Science publish a lot of excellent work. And Dr Schekman is perhaps not the most disinterested observer: as he mentions in the article, he is the editor of eLife, an "open-access" journal (that is, one that does not charge readers) with ambitions to rival the top dogs. But working researchers will also tell you, perhaps after a few drinks, that Dr Schekman is far from alone in thinking that the relentless focus on publishing in "high-impact" journals causes big distortions in how science is done. Many are reluctant to speak up, fearful of the damage they might cause to their careers by rocking the boat. One of the many perks of being a Nobel lauerate is that you no longer have to worry about such things (though one wonders what the Nobel-less researchers employed at Dr Schekman's lab think of the new policy).

In related news, and also in the Guardian, the physicist Peter Higgs—also a Nobel winner, this time for being one of the researchers who predicted the existence of the boson that is now named after him—has said that he doubts he could survive as a scientist in today's academy. Any modern university, he thinks, would sack him for not being productive enough—for not getting a steady stream of papers published in nice, high-impact journals. Both pieces are well worth a read (as is our related article on the systemic flaws that plague the scientific world).