Academic publishing: a discussion

@Michiel Tack I would agree that it would be useful to have a way of grouping such threads together. Recently we have had quite a lot of threads addressing publishing and publishing ethics.

Would the best way of doing this be to create a separate ‘Forum’ under the “Other News and Research” heading?
 
I notice that biorxiv, the preprint server for biology, has added a note saying:
bioRxiv is receiving many new papers on coronavirus 2019-nCoV. A reminder: these are preliminary reports that have not been peer-reviewed. They should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or be reported in news media as established information.
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Was listening to this 2016 podcast "Everything Herz: 17: Journals: Do we need them?" and they mentioned that in physics and mathematics it is common for researchers to just publish their article on their academic profile where it gets a DOI, so without journals as an intermediary.

They also mentioned the interesting option that large funders of researcher could act as an academic publisher - they have put the money in and so have an interest that results are reported correctly. These would largely be public-funded institutions like the NIH but their option to publish would then be open to all, like clinicaltrials.gov, which is also funded by the NIH but researchers from all over the world can register their trial there if I understand correctly.
 
Merged thread

A short article on peer review

‘Nothing like what the public think it is’: Peter Ridd on the truth about climate change and ‘peer review’

Edit : The article doesn't actually mention climate change, it only discusses peer review.

Dr Peter Ridd speaks to Gideon Rozner about why ‘peer review’ is not necessarily the quality-control mechanism that the public has been led to believe it is.

Peter Ridd: Peer review is nothing like what the public think it is. Peer review is usually when a couple of scientists review a piece of work for often not more than a couple of hours. They may actually be friends of the original scientist. The original work is never replicated. The experiment is never done again. They don’t pore over the data or anything like that. It’s just a cursory check. So the public have been conned by a lot of scientists into thinking that peer review is something, which it is not.”

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https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/0...e-truth-about-climate-change-and-peer-review/
 
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Jaybee00 said:
Surgisphere scandal: Lancet still doesn’t get it
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia....candal-legacy-media-lancet-still-dont-get-it/

mentions this NYT article

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/health/virus-journals.html
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Dr. Horton called the paper retracted by his journal a “fabrication” and “a monumental fraud.” But peer review was never intended to detect outright deceit, he said, and anyone who thinks otherwise has “a fundamental misunderstanding of what peer review is.”

“If you have an author who deliberately tries to mislead, it’s surprisingly easy for them to do so,” he said.
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So this gives retraction an important role since peer review is inadequate. But that is broken when retraction is rejected even after evidence of egregious fraud with explicit intent to mislead. As fitting for the Lancet PACE paper as it is for Cochrane, where numerous flaws were identified during the review process and not a single one was actually addressed but now, oops, too late, can't retract.

And especially breaks when the editor-in-chief is party to the deception. And the "professional skeptics" don't care because they are content that the fraud validates their beliefs.

What a failure this guy is. Hell, it seems every British medical journal is incapable of performing their function since they do the same: give cover to politicized outright fraud and help in the cover-up.

Break down the whole system. It's an industry. It is failing. It has failed. Break it down entirely and rebuild a functional system in its place.
 
There was a paper published today where the abstract really caught my eye:

Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where articles are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this article we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting articles by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer review will lead on average to more reviewers per article than journal-solicited peer review. Second, due to the wisdom of the crowds, more reviewers will tend to make better judgements than fewer reviewers will. We make the second claim precise by looking at the Condorcet jury theorem as well as two related jury theorems developed specifically to apply to peer review.
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This definitely made me think it could be revolutionary, because as we know, S4ME tends to be far better at peer review, than uhhhh, peer review.

The paper:
Jury Theorems for Peer Review
Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 202576:2, 319-344
 
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