11–20 of 86 posts
Unless scientists and researchers start to put the interests of collaboration and “open science” ahead of their desire to be promoted or win tenure the system will not change This is the main problem because most won't.
Yea, the real question is how to show their efforts in an open system so they can get tenure without fear of being "scooped" by being open
1. Scientists publish in slow peer reviewed journals, because scientific publication has to be peer reviewed. The reviewers are a very small selection of other scientists, who are expert in the field of the publication. As long as the reviewers don't signal white smoke, a publication is no science by definition. This way of work is important to keep quality excellent. We certainly don't need more quickly published junk that stirs the world but is found to be inaccurate later.
Can we accelerate the process of peer reviewing? I doubt that. As I have written, the reviewers are other scientists who have to find the time to read and comment new articles. The more time they spend with this, the less time they spend doing research. So the small amount of experts usually is responsible for being slow.
You may be quicker by internet publishing, if (IF!) you work on a highly dynamic field where other scientists are hungry for your results. As the author writes, this is the exception. Most scientific results will be useful only a long time after the publication, if they will be useful at all. In this way, science is much faster than application already.
2. The author writes, we could make progress faster. Please: why? It seems to be a sign of the time that we want to accelerate everything. It is most likely that this will only produce more noise. We need to slow down our lives and our thinking to stay accurate and produce real value. I am glad that science results, at least in my field, are still reliably scrutinized by many. This way I know that reading and spending the time to understand the stuff is worth my time.
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/how-might-we-get-to-...
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/a-more-modest-propos...
Two comments: 1. Scientists publish in slow peer reviewed journals, because scientific publication has to be peer reviewed. The reviewers are a very small selection of other scientists, who are expert in the field of the publication. As long as the reviewers don't signal white smoke, a publication is no science by definition. This way of work is important to keep quality excellent. We certainly don't need more quickl…
Unless scientists and researchers start to put the interests of collaboration and “open science” ahead of their desire to be promoted or win tenure the system will not change This is the main problem because most won't.
I absolutely would if I could do it and still get funded. I'd love to share everything openly. Just pay my bills as I do it. Currently, science is funded based on individual results. You can't blame folk for wanting to be promoted or to win tenure.
Yeah, there's a direct tension between the move over the past few decades towards very competitive grant funding (10% funding rates, short grant terms, much fewer long-term, large block grants for centers), and a goal of having everyone share everything altruistically. If you purposely set up science funding so that it encourages cutthroat competition, people are going to have to behave like cutthroat competitors, and those who try not to will (on average) lose to those who do.
With today's computer speeds there is no reason to do the statistics the way they're doing it. You don't need to make strong and unjustified assumptions about your data because then you can use a simple T-test. Today with simulation you can do pretty much any statistical test you want. You can do Bayesian inference.
However, most of these scientists are not capable of programming that themselves in R. What is needed is a simple GUI interface where they can state their assumptions and enter their data. Then the program calculates their posteriors and does any hypothesis test they want. The statistics scientists use today are optimized for pen and paper. The assumptions no longer hold. Who cares if the computation takes 500 milliseconds on a computer instead of 3 milliseconds?
> Unless scientists and researchers start to put the interests of collaboration and “open science” ahead of their desire to be promoted or win tenure the system will not change
Something similar could be said about so many industries, including our own.
Two comments: 1. Scientists publish in slow peer reviewed journals, because scientific publication has to be peer reviewed. The reviewers are a very small selection of other scientists, who are expert in the field of the publication. As long as the reviewers don't signal white smoke, a publication is no science by definition. This way of work is important to keep quality excellent. We certainly don't need more quickl…
Of course it is arguable that peer review weeds out noise too. But you have to get your work in front of a peer, and they have to understand your contribution. Its also arguable that peer review leads to stagnation and missed opportunities/discoveries. In fact, surely it does.
In my personal experience the main problem with scientific research today is caused by publication counts representing the sole metric for academic success. Research is 'optimized' for publications and segmented according to conference schedules. That in itself I consider detrimental to the research effort. However the major damage in terms of advancing resarch in my opinion is caused by the induced tendency of schol…