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posted by janrinok on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the peer-reviewed-by-anonymous dept.

A judge has ordered that anonymous peer reviewers for an article in a science journal be unmasked on behalf of the exercise regimen company CrossFit, Inc.. The journal is published by a competitor of CrossFit:

In what appears to be a first, a U.S. court is forcing a journal publisher to breach its confidentiality policy and identify an article's anonymous peer reviewers.

The novel order, issued last month by a state judge in California, has alarmed some publishers, who fear it could deter scientists from agreeing to review draft manuscripts. Legal experts say the case, involving two warring fitness enterprises, isn't likely to unleash widespread unmasking. But some scientists are watching closely.

The dispute revolves around a 2013 paper, since retracted, that appeared in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. In the study, researchers at The Ohio State University in Columbus evaluated physical and physiological changes in several dozen volunteers who participated for 10 weeks in a training regimen developed by CrossFit Inc. of Washington, D.C. Among other results, they reported that 16% of participants dropped out because of injury.

In public and in court, CrossFit has alleged that the injury statistic is false. CrossFit also claims that the journal's publisher, the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) of Colorado Springs, Colorado—which is a competitor in the fitness business—intentionally skewed the study to damage CrossFit. NSCA in turn has countersued, accusing CrossFit executives of defamation. Amid the legal crossfire, the journal first corrected the paper to reduce the number of injuries associated with CrossFit, then retracted it last year, citing changes to a study protocol that were not first approved by a university review board.

CrossFit suspects the paper's reviewers and editors worked to play up injuries associated with its regimen, and it has asked both federal and state judges to force the publisher to unmask the reviewers. In 2014, a federal judge refused that request. But last month, Judge Joel Wohlfeil of the San Diego Superior Court in California, who is overseeing NSCA's defamation suit against CrossFit, ordered the association to provide the names.


Original Submission

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Should Scientific Journals Publish Text of Peer Reviews? 23 comments

Attendees of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute meeting debated whether or not science journals should publish the text of peer reviews, or even require peer reviewers to publicly sign their paper critiques:

Scientific journals should start routinely publishing the text of peer reviews for each paper they accept, said attendees at a meeting last week of scientists, academic publishers, and funding organizations. But there was little consensus on whether reviewers should have to publicly sign their critiques, which traditionally are accessible only to editors and authors.

The meeting—hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) here, and sponsored by HHMI; ASAPbio, a group that promotes the use of life sciences preprints; and the London-based Wellcome Trust—drew more than 100 participants interested in catalyzing efforts to improve the vetting of manuscripts and exploring ways to open up what many called an excessively opaque and slow system of peer review. The crowd heard presentations and held small group discussions on an array of issues. One hot topic: whether journals should publish the analyses of submitted papers written by peer reviewers.

Publishing the reviews would advance training and understanding about how the peer-review system works, many speakers argued. Some noted that the evaluations sometimes contain insights that can prompt scientists to think about their field in new ways. And the reviews can serve as models for early career researchers, demonstrating how to write thorough evaluations. "We saw huge benefits to [publishing reviews] that outweigh the risks," said Sue Biggins, a genetics researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, summarizing one discussion.

But attendees also highlighted potential problems. For example, someone could cherry pick critical comments on clinical research studies that are involved in litigation or public controversy, potentially skewing perceptions of the studies. A possible solution? Scientists should work to "make the public understand that [peer review] is a fault-finding process and that criticism is part of and expected in that process," said Veronique Kiermer, executive editor of the PLOS suite of journals, based in San Francisco, California.

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Judge Orders Unmasking of Anonymous Peer Reviewers in CrossFit Lawsuit


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:43AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:43AM (#631287)

    Don't put your name on anything. We'll just have to depend the reputation of one's internet avatar, with no real name attached to come back haunt you. It might help to spoof your IP also. Geolocation seems to be a thing that is often abused.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:31AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:31AM (#631300)

      I take away a different lesson. When I peer review engineering papers, I'm going to start keeping my notes and comments so I have a backup. That way I could tell if someone changed my review behind my back. But most of the time I know the organizer of the technical session (who oversees the review process) well enough that I'm not really worried.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:25AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:25AM (#631340)

        But none of that protects you from the police. If you want to do something anonymously, you have to take steps so that nobody can identify you no matter what the judge orders.

        • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:52PM

          by edIII (791) on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:52PM (#631645)

          Damned right. You cannot depend on someone's honor for jack diddly shit, unless they're the Alpha and Omega of the process. Nobody ever is, since law enforcement exists with a government that wants to watch and record everything for our security.

          If you want to be anonymous, then it needs to be done on a technical level, not a social one via verbal agreements. Social locks are can be as good as wet paper holding the bad people back (government), or almost as good as technical (Larry Flynt going to prison to protect a source). Technical locks though can be forever, and in some cases absolute, and they're never vulnerable to the threat of imprisonment or worse.

          Any anonymous peer review that has a section for you to put your name in, has already failed.

          This judge apparently doesn't understand that every participant expected privacy, and certainly doesn't value anonymity which is a bedrock principle of our country.

          --
          Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @11:56AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @11:56AM (#631433)

        Don't forget to sign and date the pages.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by citizenr on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:34AM (2 children)

    by citizenr (2737) on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:34AM (#631387)

    Of course they sued, CrossFit motto is work thru the injury. Sure, first scab will rip right away, so will the second and third, but after 2 weeks of profuse bleeding enough dead tissue will grow and make you hardly notice the pain!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @12:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @12:55PM (#631449)

      No pain !! No gain !!

    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:55PM

      by edIII (791) on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:55PM (#631646)

      I've heard of crossfit craziness, but is it really that dangerous?

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:18PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:18PM (#631456)

    In public and in court, CrossFit has alleged that the injury statistic is false

    Funny phrasing, the journalist unstated oppositional implication is its lower than 16% but the legal SLAPP lawsuits will technically be true if the actual percentage is 20%.

    If the actual number were 15.9999999% then the carefully crafted legal phrase would be "the injury statistic is falsely high" which it isn't, so that seems to imply the reported stat is incorrectly ... low.

    Based on observation of behavior of crossfit people at the gym, my opinion is at least locally it is higher, which also fits the peculiar legal phrasing.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:18PM (#631478)

    This is a solid argument why commercial entities should not be relied on to do research. Don't like a result you get? Don't publish. Don't like a result someone else gets? Sue. There is no truth, only market share.

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