Well... do you?

"disproves"

You keep using that word.

I do not think it means what you think it means.

In the immortal words of George Carlin:

"I've never fucked a 10, but one night I fucked five 2's, and I think that oughta count."

It's worse than that.

They're afraid that the world will soon learn some inconvenient truths: (a) that Oswald in fact acted alone in assassinating Kennedy, (b) that the crashed object at Roswell was in fact a high-altitude weather balloon, (c) that the Rosenberg's were in fact Soviet spies, (d) that the moon landings in fact happened and were not staged in a Houston hangar, and (e) that every ounce of the gold in Ft. Knox is in fact sitting exactly where it should be.

And then the American public might start asking questions related to ACTUAL government conspiracies.

The horror...

The problem is that Schekman's argument is off base.

From the article (yes, I read it):

"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."

His argument appears to revolve around these three high-impact journals serving as the gate keepers of "good" science. But his ire is misdirected. If funding and appointment panels are giving undue weight to publications in these journals, then THE PROBLEM LIES WITH THE FUNDING AND APPOINTMENT PANELS, not the journals.

His argument is paramount to "Scientists shouldn't publish in these journals because they're too highly regarded."

You are correct.

Weak science and insufficient sample sizes are matters for the journal's referees to suss out and, if necessary, recommend that the journal not publish the paper. The fact that the paper passed peer review should have the journal re-examining their editorial/peer-review policies.

Ultimately, the decision to publish (and responsibility for publishing) a paper lies with the journal's editor in chief.

That's nothing.

In Alabama, you're guilty of DUI if you are simply in possession of car keys while intoxicated:

http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/alabamas-dui-offense-what-exactly-is-actual-physical-control

The boycott of Elsevier was primarily related to their "bundling" of journals---the act of forcing libraries to buy subscriptions to their low-impact, narrowly focused, but very expensive journals in order to have access to their high-impact, high-circulation journals. See http://www.nature.com/news/elsevier-boycott-gathers-pace-1.10010

Think about this process.

Elsevier prints journals for which they receive their content FOR FREE from academic researchers, most of whom are funded by taxpayer money. They then receive FREE peer review of those articles from the academic science community, many of whose salaries are paid from taxpayer funds. They then turn around and sell those articles back to the very universities whose professors provided the content and peer review (for FREE), which are also funded by taxpayers. And THEN they have the audacity to price gouge in the process.

Nice work if you can get it. But don't expect to not be called a profiteer.

And what exactly happens to all of those "doctors" with $400,000 student loans who now cannot work as doctors?

If we used your approach, no doctor would ever be able to secure a student loan again. The risk of default would be astronomically high. The only difference is that now the lenders would be the ones choosing who gets to become a doctor.

P-chem is difficult because it's students' first immersion into quantum mechanics.

You learned the sanitized version of quantum in gen chem---all those rules about electron configurations and the funky shapes of atomic orbitals. But you simply memorized it. In P-chem, you were confronted with the actual wavefunctions from which all of that stuff is derived. If you've never seen a wavefunction or eigenvalue before, it's a total mind trip. And virtually nobody has encountered such things prior to P-chem.

And then you learn that, once you move beyond a one-electron atom, must of the equations become impossible to solve. And now you must introduce a series of assumptions and limitations to arrive at any solution whatsoever. And that's when the goo starts oozing out of your ears.

Somewhere at the end of it all, you realize that chemistry and theoretical physics are not distinctly different subjects.

There's a certain perverse logic in using Organic I and II to weed students out.

They're sophomore-level courses. They're also the most difficult two-course sequence all pre-med/pre-vet/pre-pharmacy students will collectively take during their first two years. Pre-med students outnumber the openings in medical school by at least 10 to 1. They must be weeded at some point. The sooner you weed them out, the sooner those students can stop wasting their time and tuition money on a course of study they will never complete.

I'm not sure I agree with it, but that's the logic as it was explained to me.

The purpose of O-chem for medical students is to give them a fundamental understanding of bonding behavior of organic compounds so that they can later extrapolate that knowledge to biochemical processes.

The lack of proper training in statistics for the vast majority of physicians is a completely separate problem.

In many respects, its unfortunate that chem majors (I was one, too) take O-chem alongside pre-med students.

The most useful aspect of O-chem is learning to interpret the various spectroscopic results used to characterize organic compounds (particularly NMR spectra). This information is quite useless, however, to those who are not chem majors. We instead spend an inane amount of time learning hundreds of chemical reactions that neither the pre-meds nor the chem majors really need to know.

Even then, the course doesn't have to be as difficult as it's made to be, which I finally figured out the first time I taught organic chemistry. We simply make it that difficult to weed students out. Many students who probably would have made fine chemists saw their chemistry careers end in Organic II---all in the name of convincing a lot of pre-meds that they were never going to become doctors.