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posted by martyb on Sunday October 01 2017, @11:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the scientific-skirmishes dept.

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 ??


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 02 2017, @08:19AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday October 02 2017, @08:19AM (#575815) Journal

    but it's pretty clear to me this should be author's choice.

    Of course. Nowhere did the OP say otherwise.

    There are some total wierdos, like yours truly, who think that in many cases a wiki is all peer review a study needs.

    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.

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