31–40 of 45 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you image this is a trivial problem to solve, I think your imagination is not very good. I'll quote the Bruce Schneier quote from the article. “There are almost never technical solutions to social problems.”
Great quote. It gets me thinking about Facebook. FB is assuredly a massive technical solution to a social problem. I get Bruce's sentiment, but there are exceptions to this rule.
1. Give an opinion as to value of the paper and if it should be published in journal x 2. Point out flaws or suggest improvements to the paper.
These two activities are not really connected to each other. The decision to publish or not in a journal is an editorial decision that reviewers should not be making. I am happy to point out flaws or suggest improvements, but who am I to make a judgment on the value an article to a journal? If the science is sound (but boring) does that make it less worthwhile of publication?
One advantage of separating these two processes is it would enable reviewers to communicate directly with the authors to ask questions or get more information. As a reviewer I have many time wanted to fire off a quick email to the authors to resolve something that I was unclear on, but the need to make the process anonymous (so I can pass judgement on the value of the paper) means everything has to go back via the editor. This makes it impossible to open a dialog with the authors and get the best result for science.
The fundamental issue with the current peer review system is that most academic research is "valueless" to those involved in the system. I use the term "valueless" in a very careful and specific meaning. It does not mean the work is without merit or doesn't have large impact or benefits to society, rather it simply means the quality of the work has no value to the peer reviewers or to the journal itself. * The peer r…
Um, you're talking about patenting the Higgs boson, the structure of DNA, the speed of light. There is academic merit in being a reviewer. Being a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine would surely favor any tenure committee or grant application. Perhaps one could argue that's hard to perceive, but I think it's safe to say any PhD sees the value. The journals, on the other hand, have abided by very loose b…
Wow! I have participated in peer review and the system can work--here, it seems like the editors were lazy. I wonder how many papers a typical editor is responsible for per day? I can understand researchers wanting to exclude groups that they are competing with. I always assumed that editors would check suggested referees against obvious conflicts of interest, but perhaps there really are too many papers and too many…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great quote. It gets me thinking about Facebook. FB is assuredly a massive technical solution to a social problem. I get Bruce's sentiment, but there are exceptions to this rule.
And what social problem does FB solve?
The fundamental issue with the current peer review system is that most academic research is "valueless" to those involved in the system. I use the term "valueless" in a very careful and specific meaning. It does not mean the work is without merit or doesn't have large impact or benefits to society, rather it simply means the quality of the work has no value to the peer reviewers or to the journal itself. * The peer r…
In other words, your proposed journal just managed to increase the cost of publication by over an order of magnitude.
I'm an author on several physics papers published before I switched careers to become a programmer. So I've been published in "big name" (for physics) journals. Peer review, even without people scamming it, is still broken. The reason is, presuming you have an ideal peer panel, everyone is competent in the art of the paper. This means that they are all working in schools of research relevant to the paper they are rev…
The urge to censor not by written rule or by conspiracy, but just to protect self interest, is very strong. A system must take that into account.
They say science advances by funeral - and that is a sad thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what social problem does FB solve?
It's pretty good for staying in touch with people who you wouldn't regularly contact on an individual basis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what social problem does FB solve?
It's pretty good for staying in touch with people who you wouldn't regularly contact on an individual basis.
[reposting from a previous submission that didn't get any traction] If anyone wants a good idea for a startup in the academic journals space, I'd recommend looking into vetting peer reviewers as part of the article submission/review process. There have been a few high profile cases of people faking their peer reviews recently. At Sage we dealt with a big case of that earlier in the year and retracted 60 papers. A new…