I can't help it. Similarity in the two names is impossible for me to ignore.
A recent Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine has taken a justifiable and important stand on science magazines. His name is Randy Schekman.
I instantly remembered a character from Two and a Half Men, a TV show with Charlie Sheen. Dr. Shenkman was the mythical figure who did all of the plastic surgery on Charlie’s forever young and horney mother. Including some touch up work on her rectum. The subject I know about mostly from my friendly gay neighbors.
Enough with that silly joke.
Prof. Schekman has used his Nobel Prize bully pulpit to complain that the leading magazines in science are run by journalists and not by people who know science. As a consequence these prestigious journals lean toward journalistic excitement instead of scientific hard work and rigor.
I complained for many years while regularly reading Science magazine that the editors didn't understand science, never looked at the political controversies surrounding ideological science and worst of all never corrected mistakes made by dishonest scientists. Science Magazine never investigated nor reported on the issues of dishonesty and fraud in science.
That is on top of the basic problem with all science journals: their high price makes certain that science is a secretive, sequestered field filled with poppycock and irrelevance.
No one has ever suggested that good science thrives behind a high pay wall. It keeps out young scientists and interested researchers in parallel fields.
Thank you Dr. Schekman. You will have no influence but you will be remembered as one of the very few honest, decent people in science.
(This NYTimes article confirms everything Dr. Schekman and I say about science publications.)