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Earlier this month, when the biotech firm Human Longevity published a controversial paper claiming that it could predict what a person looks like based on only a teeny bit of DNA, it was just a little over a week before a second paper was published discrediting it as flawed and false. The lightening[sic] speed with which the rebuttal was delivered was thanks to bioRxiv, a server where scientists can publish pre-prints of papers before they have gone through the lengthy peer-review process. It took only four more days before a rebuttal to the rebuttal was up on bioRxiv, too.
This tit-for-tat biological warfare was only the latest in a series of scientific kerfuffles that have played out on pre-print servers like bioRxiv. In a piece that examines the boom of biology pre-prints, Science questions their impact on the field. In a time when a scandal can unfold and resolve in a single day's news cycle, pre-prints can lead to science feuds that go viral, unfolding without the oversight of peer-review at a rapid speed.
"Such online squabbles could leave the public bewildered and erode trust in scientists," Science argued. Many within the scientific community agree.
Should Scientists Be Posting Their Work Online Before Peer Review?
[Source Article (PDF)]: THE PREPRINT DILEMMA
What do you think ??
(Score: 5, Informative) by gringer on Sunday October 01 2017, @11:56PM (10 children)
Yes.
I've had one research collaborator who submitted a paper for review, got it delayed, then was research-sniped by another lab who published curiously-similar work to what they had submitted in their paper. Telling people early about your research makes it better; telling people early and publicly about your research makes it a lot more difficult for other researchers to claim that they were the first to have the idea.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by melikamp on Monday October 02 2017, @12:54AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 02 2017, @08:19AM
Of course. Nowhere did the OP say otherwise.
I don't see any indication in that post that the OP thinks that way.
To start with, a preprint server is not a wiki. The only one who has control over the paper that's put there is the author himself. Of course someone else can write a rebuttal, but that is a separate paper. And of course that's possible in a peer-reviewed journal, too.
Second, the OP didn't state that the paper should only be put on the preprint server. I don't know about biology journals, but in physics it is quite common that a journal allows to put a preprint on arXiv before submission; some even offer a procedure where you can submit directly from the preprint server. And authors of published papers will usually put a link to the published version to the arXiv abstract page as soon as the paper is actually published.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @01:36AM (3 children)
I had my stuff stolen. I was taking a class in logic that was taught by a professor whose PhD mentor was one of the authors of the book. We hit an unanswered question, and I came up with the solution. My professor and worked on writing a paper and were just about ready to submit it, when my professor came to our next meeting with a dejected look on his face. The other coauthor of the book had stolen my idea and was going to have it published. Turns out my professor told his mentor who told his coauthor who rushed out a paper. So now, my idea has numerous papers written about it, appears in SEP, and taught in a textbook used by tens of thousands (at least) of students a year, while being named after someone else.
At least I got an "A" in the class.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheLink on Monday October 02 2017, @08:22AM (1 child)
I suspect I was the one who inspired CoDel. Everyone and dog was barking up the wrong tree about buffers being too large:
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2071893&preflayout=flat#comments [acm.org]
See Dave Taht's post about "byte queue limits" - limiting queues by bytes:
Followed by my comment:
Followed by my other comment:
After that they came up with CoDel and some revisionist history in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDel#The_CoDel_algorithm [wikipedia.org]
Which is disingenuous since they were still fixated about buffer and queue sizes for years till I made that comment and if you read the actual 2006 pdf ( http://www.pollere.net/Pdfdocs/QrantJul06.pdf [pollere.net] ) it was still stuck in that sort of thinking. You can see the suggestions they were talking about in 2006 was different from the method I suggested. Do note the wiki citation for that sentence is to a 2012 paper, which being in 2012 doesn't back up the claim that it was based on a 2006 notion ;).
But I'm more amused than anything. And I'll be happy if Cisco etc started doing things better. But I wouldn't have any money to challenge any patents though, so if anyone patents ( https://www.google.com/patents/US9686201 [google.com] ) and charges for such stuff I'll leave it to others to fight that prior art thing.
See also my comment on Slashdot in Jan 2011: https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1939940&cid=34793154 [slashdot.org]
That's before the Dec 2011 comments and 2012 paper and the patent application.
From that Dec 2010 article ( https://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-glasse-must-not-throw-stones-at-another/ [wordpress.com] )
to the Dec 2011 article those bunch were still going "OMG buffers are too big!". When that's not really the problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @11:18AM
See, this is exactly the kind of garbage we'll have to filter through when reading everyone's articles.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tfried on Monday October 02 2017, @07:14PM
Well, that sucks. I feel for you there.
But then, preprints (aka pre-review-publication) wouldn't have helped you at all, as it just speeds up the process for anyone. If some random asshole can beat you to submitting a paper for peer review, they can beat you to non-reviewed publication just the same.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Monday October 02 2017, @05:17AM (1 child)
I do see you point. But I'm afraid we might get over-run with half-finished WIP (work in progress) papers if we go down this path. The WIP work is for colleagues and friends to read and critique. Sure I guess if you don't have either of those then it might be what you have to resort to, after all nobody likes to spend years on something only to be told it's crap and someone was there before you. But I suspect that people instead of writing a good paper are going to post/publish a mountain of WIP work in hope that one of them mentions something that someone else then has finished and in turn claim credit for coming up with the idea for. Trying to cover as much academic ground as they possibly can. It's going to be a nightmare for citation, did or didn't you know about this WIP-work X posted and did you read it and stole their idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @06:21AM
Totally agree - who can be bothered to read all the tit-for-tat garbage? Save it for your blog, please.
Also, you can imagine the citations (and bloated citation counts) when every cunt wants to cite every turd they ever squeezed out to try to establish priority 5 minutes before someone else did it. Save it for your court case over patent royalties.
(Score: 2) by tfried on Monday October 02 2017, @07:23PM (1 child)
Don't know. That would appear to mean that you require everybody to read all potentially relevant non-reviewed ("preprint") papers.
There will always be annoying race conditions, and a delay is annoying by definition in itself. But any journal you submit to will know when you submitted your paper, and most will even mention the date of submission on the final publication, so it should be easy enough to show you were first. There might be a bit of a gap in case your paper gets refused by one journal, and you re-submit to a second journal. But even then, you can probably at least get the first editor(s) to rubber-stamp your date of initial submission.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Friday October 06 2017, @01:09AM
I'm thinking along the lines of patent infringement defense. People applying for patents don't need to have a knowledge of everything that's in the public space, and neither do the examiners. It'll just save the applicants a bit of money in being awarded a patent for something that is an already-known public invention.
However, when a claim is made for infringement, it helps to be able to say, "I publicly announced X before the priority date of the patent, so the claim for X should be invalidated."
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]