Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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 ??


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by tfried on Monday October 02 2017, @07:23PM (1 child)

    by tfried (5534) on Monday October 02 2017, @07:23PM (#576114)

    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.

    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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by gringer on Friday October 06 2017, @01:09AM

    by gringer (962) on Friday October 06 2017, @01:09AM (#577737)

    That would appear to mean that you require everybody to read all potentially relevant non-reviewed ("preprint") papers.

    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]