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It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

nature.com

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Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#121

Post by zaptheimpaler »

this is such a joke of a system. half of the web is a system for peer review already. you could basically repurpose any old forum software like Discourse or Reddit, twitter, mastodon to work as peer review. It's just people commenting on a post! With a system for verifying identity (use official email) and assigning reviewers maybe.

Then over here we see a journal publishing this trash that treats their audience as toddlers with amazing tips like

"Follow up: after submission, "

"Professional networks:.."

Mostly I'm just surprised that our smartest people put up with this, when any researcher could ask their CS colleagues to create a replacement over a few weeks. It's a pure social coordination problem, it would only take a few groups of researchers switching to light the fire. It's a preference cascade just waiting for a little nudge.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#122

Post by eru »

Fomite wrote: post #120
eru wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could blind the pre-print process, too?

I've not seen a major attempt to blind pre-prints, and given you have to remove some identifying information for blinding, I think that would be a tall order.

Why would that be a tall-order? Seems fairly simple and straight-forward, doesn't it?

You'd set up a server where people have accounts, but publishing pre-prints is anonymous by default, and identities can be revealed later.

In the current peer review system, people already have to produce papers with those identifiers removed. They can do exactly the same in the pre-print world, can't they?

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#123

Post by Fomite »

eru wrote: post #122
Fomite wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not seen a major attempt to blind pre-prints, and given you have to remove some identifying information for blinding, I think that would be a tall order.

Why would that be a tall-order? Seems fairly simple and straight-forward, doesn't it? You'd set up a server where people have accounts, but publishing pre-prints is anonymous by default, and identities can be revealed later. In the current peer review system, people already have to produce papers with those identifiers removed. They can do exactly the same in the pre-print world, can't they?

A great many papers in my field contain contextual details about the settings the studies were conducted in that would effectively deblind them.

That sort of betrays the idea of a pre-print, in my opinion, because they should not depend on "Someday we'll come back and fix this".

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#124

Post by eru »

Fomite wrote: post #123
eru wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be a tall-order? Seems fairly simple and straight-forward, doesn't it? You'd set up a server where people have accounts, but publishing pre-prints is anonymous by default, and identities can be revealed later. In the current peer review system, people already have to produce papers with those identifiers removed. They can do exactly the same in the pre-print world, can't they?

A great many papers in my field contain contextual details about the settings the studies were conducted in that would effectively deblind them. That sort of betrays the idea of a pre-print, in my opinion, because they should not depend on "Someday we'll come back and fix this".

How does conventional peer review work for those papers?

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#125

Post by santopol »

rjurney wrote: post #66

It is time to burn traditional academic publishing to the ground and rebuild it from the ground up, or else let's rebel against the government, give Alexandra Elbakyan citizenship and put her in charge of the Department of Energy to make all computer science research open domain for all the world to see. Requesting $48 for to read a paper funded by your taxes before you even know it is useful to your work will result…

As someone who knows Alexandra personally and follows her work for a very long time, I must warn you that, despite creating an awesome tool, in my opinion (and the opinion of a lot of scientists who were in communication with her) she is not a sensible person at all. She is a lot into pseudoscience (e.g. astrology) and very radical political views (she's a Stalinist), and she's got a strange mix of mysogyny and radical feminism going on. She is very open about it on public Scihub channels. At least this was the situation a year or so ago.

Re: It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals

#126

Post by JR1427 »

317070 wrote: post #103
JR1427 wrote: post #87

Speaking as a former scientist, it's worth remembering that peer review is not just about ensuring quality by preventing poor research being published. It also leads to good research being improved, in a very similar way to how code review can improve good code. So doing away with peer review would have some negative consequences. It's also worth remembering that journals are really not very different to newspapers,…

> It also leads to good research being improved, in a very similar way to how code review can improve good code. But the parallel breaks, as unlike with code reviews, there is no protection against (and the people below are real people I have encountered in my 10+ year research experience): * A reviewer writing eloquent reviews on every single paper they ever reviewed, explaining why they should be rejected, as a gim…

I agree, those are all existing problems. But I would say the don't detract from the benefits.

Maybe peer review should be time limited, but have the reviewers comments be immediately available for the authors to respond to, rather than having to wait for them all to come in.

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