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ScienceLeaks

scienceleaks.blogspot.com

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Re: ScienceLeaks

#31

Post by wvoq »

hugh3 wrote: post #3
Bud wrote: post #2

How is this site planning to stay in existence for longer than about an hour after it costs some organization a significant amount of money? Does Blogger just ignore takedown requests?

It isn't, but if you read down it's described as a stop-gap solution. If people are actually using it by the time it gets taken down then it will get resurrected elsewhere. Here's my question: suppose I, as a kind-hearted university-based individual who respects the needs of the journals to make money but is also interested in making sure that the general public can read important scientific research, decide to uploa…

I am curious about your understanding of "the needs of the journals to make money". As I understand it, the purpose of an academic journal is to communicate new research. For about 300 years, a published print journal was about the most reasonable method of accomplishing this. Printing and shipping cost money, so a subscription model was a natural means of recuperating costs. Historically, academic journals were non-profit enterprises, and stipends were rare for the academic work involved, viz: writing, refereeing, editing, &c. Since a non-profit journal loses money on each print copy it has to produce, why shouldn't they reduce physical circulation by converting to an open-access model? The only people who stand to lose from a norm of open access are the for-profit publishing houses. Their influence on academic publishing, on the whole, has not exactly been encouraging so far.

If we can find a more efficient way to communicate research (perhaps some kind of global network of computers might do the trick?), then we should do that. We ought take no more consideration of the needs of the journals than we should for the needs of the buggy-whip makers.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#32

Post by dnautics »

I wanted to start a 'scienceleaks' site that was actually a site that facilitated the whistleblowing on scientific fraud. A small raffle for a cash prize can be a huge incentive for underpaid grad students.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#33

Post by roadnottaken »

zeteo wrote: post #30
roadnottaken wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system... " To misquote Churchill: Peer review is the worst system for scientific publishing... except for all the others.

It's not misquote, it's paraphrase.

No, to paraphrase is to summarize or re-word [1]. I changed the meaning (from democracy to peer-review [2]). I'm not sure misquote was the best word-choice, but I definitely wasn't paraphrasing.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraphrase

[2] "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”" -- Winston Churchill

Re: ScienceLeaks

#36

Post by duncanj »

roadnottaken wrote: post #33
zeteo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not misquote, it's paraphrase.

No, to paraphrase is to summarize or re-word [1]. I changed the meaning (from democracy to peer-review [2]). I'm not sure misquote was the best word-choice, but I definitely wasn't paraphrasing. [1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraphrase [2] "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”" -- Winston Churchill

You can say what you want to say, since it's original, and say, "with apologies to Winston Churchill."

Re: ScienceLeaks

#37

Post by zeteo »

roadnottaken wrote: post #33
zeteo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not misquote, it's paraphrase.

No, to paraphrase is to summarize or re-word [1]. I changed the meaning (from democracy to peer-review [2]). I'm not sure misquote was the best word-choice, but I definitely wasn't paraphrasing. [1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraphrase [2] "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”" -- Winston Churchill

If you google "to paraphrase Winston Churchill", you hit the figure of speech that you've used. It's a pretty common turn of (para)phrase.

PS: Don't rely too much on dictionary.com, it's not the best. E.g. the New Oxford American Dictionary correctly gives the second meaning of "paraphrase: a rewording of something written or spoken by someone else".

Re: ScienceLeaks

#38

Post by forkandwait »

roadnottaken wrote: post #26
forkandwait wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part, scientists publish in the highest prestige journal possible, because that counts the most toward tenure/ pay raises/ grant application chances; the most prestigous journals are -- for historical reasons -- still closed since they are profit centers for big for-profit publishing houses like Wiley. On the other hand, all the scientists I know wish they could give their papers away for free because it…

"so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system... " To misquote Churchill: Peer review is the worst system for scientific publishing... except for all the others.

Peer review happens the following way: editor gets manuscript, if it passes first cut (it's not obviously crazy) sends to three elder scholars in the (hopefully) appropriate subfield, they send it back after about 3 months with snarky comments based on cutting edge work their advisors did done 10-20 years previous, rinse repeat In the social sciences, it takes about 2 years from submission to paper publication.

In the pre-internet days, peer review like this prevented some bullshit from wasting the relatively scarce resources used by paper / USPS distribution and storage. Today it is just goofy, and only serves as a weird sort of evaluation procedure of scholars who rack up "scholarship points" just like some weird game of monopoly.

What about all the crap that gets "published" electronically, you ask? Almost by definition a "subfield" is a collection of people able to evaluate each other's work; if everybody in a subfield gets emails when a new paper is available, they ALL evaluate it via the internet (chat/ email/ etc), and they are all peers, and we see the old school scholarly distribution system to be parasitic ...

.... except there is no other way to rack up "scholarship points", so people continue to submit to the old school journals with their crusty old reviewers and their bullshit.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#39

Post by eli »

zeteo wrote: post #37
roadnottaken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, to paraphrase is to summarize or re-word [1]. I changed the meaning (from democracy to peer-review [2]). I'm not sure misquote was the best word-choice, but I definitely wasn't paraphrasing. [1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraphrase [2] "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”" -- Winston Churchill

If you google "to paraphrase Winston Churchill", you hit the figure of speech that you've used. It's a pretty common turn of (para)phrase. PS: Don't rely too much on dictionary.com, it's not the best. E.g. the New Oxford American Dictionary correctly gives the second meaning of "paraphrase: a rewording of something written or spoken by someone else".

It's a common phrase because it's meant to be funny. The word "paraphrase" is being used ironically

Re: ScienceLeaks

#40

Post by roadnottaken »

forkandwait wrote: post #38
roadnottaken wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system... " To misquote Churchill: Peer review is the worst system for scientific publishing... except for all the others.

Peer review happens the following way: editor gets manuscript, if it passes first cut (it's not obviously crazy) sends to three elder scholars in the (hopefully) appropriate subfield, they send it back after about 3 months with snarky comments based on cutting edge work their advisors did done 10-20 years previous, rinse repeat In the social sciences, it takes about 2 years from submission to paper publication. In th…

There's some truth to what you say, but I think it's a little over-cynical. I know the biology/chemistry world so that's all I can speak on. In bio/chem the peer review system has flaws, but it's largely effective, IMHO. I've never seen a paper take longer than 6 months from submission to publication (I've published 22 papers) and the majority take ~3 months. There are bad reviewers out there that are unscrupulous, lazy, or incompetent... but there are also plenty of good ones and a good editor can tell them apart and adjudicate appropriately.

As to the purpose of peer review and whether it's still needed: Biology/chemistry is huge and there are probably 100-200 journals that each publish ~50 papers/month that are potentially relevant to my work. I skim them all (and use e-mail alerts to notify me of anything especially relevant) but I certainly don't have time to read them all with sufficient depth to be critical. As such, I rely on editors and reviewers to pre-screen papers and only let the highest quality research into the most-prestigious journals. The system is, of course, flawed in many ways... but, if nothing else, the competitive-ness of the top-journals "keeps the riff-raff out". With the exception of articles that are directly relevant to me, I only take a close look at papers that appear in the top ~5 journals because most of the lower-tier journals are pretty boring. My behavior is pretty typical, from what I've seen in my field.

In a perfect world I'd have enough time to evaluate everything on it's own merit, but I don't (no-one does). But if a paper has made it into a good-to-great journal, that at least means that (a) an editor thought it was interesting and (b) three or four respected scientists read it carefully and thought it was pretty good. As you pointed out, there are lots of places where this system can err, but overall it does a pretty good job and serves my needs well. It's sort of like the point-system on HN: good comments sometimes get missed, and bad comments sometimes get up-voted... but overall it's a pretty effective way to help people separate the interesting from the banal or trivial.

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