Why isn't preprint review being adopted?

To stretch an analogy it is like email. The job of the editor is the same as the spam detection service run by hosted email providers. They actually go in and actively hide scams and worthless ad email from you, and we thank them for it. Some email providers have recently started offering "focused inbox" modes where they prioritize emails for you too. I don't use that, but I could see why some people do. But importantly they don't block email based on those heuristics, like they might do for spam. You still get non-priority emails. But imagine a world where gmail straight up blocked/rejected email which it didn't consider priority. Would you want that?

The situation with journals is comparable. Editors have a spam/crank detection duty, but they shouldn't be rejecting manuscripts beyond that.

I'm glad we agree that paper slicing is also plaguing academia. When I was a grad student, it bugged me to no end that those guys at Stanford were out-publishing me--because they got enough results for 1.5 papers, and then made (3 choose 2) papers out of them.

And yeah, if you think I wasn't tempted to follow suit, think again. I eventually left academia because I didn't want to cheat, or compete with cheaters, when we were being graded on the curve of "publish or perish".

> fraud is rampant and driving the explosion in publication rates is deeply tempting to folks who don’t work directly in a scientific field.

So, you are an assistant prof who was passed over for tenure, or you didn't get that Harvard appointment--it went to Francesca Gino, whose vita looks sooooo much better than yours, because she's doing TED talks to promote her book called "Why It Pays To Break The Rules In Work And Life". She's making $1 million a year consulting, while you are trying to get funding for your research, which isn't as flashy but at least is real science...

... if you are graded on the curve, how will you look against someone who cheated? It's the prisoner's dilemma.

> How is anyone going to replicate a result if it’s not published?

In my proposal, it works the same that way can they review a paper if it's not published. You write up a paper, detailing the claims you are making and the experiments and methods you used to justify your claims, and you submit it for publication.

Then, 3 or 4 anonymous reviewers decide whether it's promising enough to go to the next step: hire another research group to replicate the results. If the results replicate, then and only then are they published.

Yes, it's more expensive, so to finance it I propose that when the grant is being written, the principle investigators should also estimate what it would cost to hire reviewers and to fund experiments at another lab to confirm the results.

When the grant is approved, that money is put in escrow until the research is done and submitted for publication, and disbursed to the reviewers and replicators to compensate them for pausing their own research and evaluating someone else's. If it replicates, it's published. If it doesn't replicate, you don't get to write up books on how to cheat your way to the top while you are cheating your way to the top.

> This is literally the reason that scientific publication exists ...

100% agree, its great to share new results and all---but if a "result" doesn't replicate, its not a result. What, exactly, are Gino's peers supposed to learn from her fraudulent papers? If I'm trying to decide what to research, how do I know which lines are actually promising or not? Do I just go with researchers at a name-brand university (like Gino at Harvard?)

These days papers can be written by machine as fast a a machine gun fires bullets. There's got to be some way of separating the signs from the noise.

> brownie-point credit for publications...

Publication is very important; one of my professors explained it this way: if you don't publish your results--i.e. you don't convince your peers that what you did is worthy of publishing--its like you didn't do anything at all. Then whole idea of research is to contribute to the edifice of science, and publishing is the vehicle by which that contribution is made. It's how you deliver the contribution to everybody else. And peer-review is how it is determined whether you actually made a contribution.

So the solution can't be to just stop caring about how many papers are published.

> Taken literally, your “no publication without replication” proposal would inhibit scientific replication entirely.

I hope my explanation above addresses this concern....

Put it another way, if you can design a system with a better ROC curve for classifying research, with a better TP rate for good papers, and have it cost less in real terms that current academic papers, then you are on to something. If all you've got is "papers should be free" or "it's too hard to access publishing from the outside" what you have are complaints, not solutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_...

If the system is working, publication in a reputable journal serves as a useful, albeit imperfect, indicator of scientific quality.

Top journals shouldn't be publishing deeply flawed work, or even decent work in clear need of a rewrite. It's not just about spam and cranks.