By Queena Lee-Chua Philippine Daily Inquirer

Last Dec. 10, Randy Wayne Schekman, an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, with James Rothman and Thomas Sdhof, accepted the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology.

The scientists were awarded for their work on machinery involving vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.

But Schekman announced he would no longer be publishing in the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, such as Nature, Science and Cell, even though their publication of his papers was among the bases for his getting the Nobel.

Calling the publications luxury journals, Schekman accuses them of promoting the flashiest work, not the best.

He likens the publishing culture to that of Wall Street and says that just as huge undeserved bonuses damaged banking and finance, the prestige associated with publishing in luxury journals damaged the culture of research and science as a whole.

Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, [luxury journals] know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept, Schekman says in the British Guardian.

Schekman also says the so-called impact factor, the number of times research papers are cited in subsequent studies, is a deeply flawed measure.

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Nobel Prize winner shuns ‘luxury journals’