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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @04:20AM (7 children)
The point of journals at some time may have been able being able to get your ideas to the public. But they haven't served that role for a very long time. Now their main role is a filtering mechanism that ensures some degree of value and endorsement of what is stated. Many fields become increasingly esoteric. Even those which have not, seem to have suffered a trend of scientists anxious to try to make their papers as impenetrable as humanly possible. I can only assume they, or journals, feel this makes them seem more educated, like literary editors of the 19th century anxious to one-up each other with their word-smithery. The point there in either case is that many papers are increasingly outside the reach of the public, and so then publishing them to that public implicitly soliciting feedback is like asking a grade schooler to review War and Peace.
Publishing straight to the internet gives a paper no inherent trustability. And in the public mind all papers are created equally. And it leads to scenarios like this where poorly considered 'rebuttals' are "published" only to be immediately rebutted by other "published" papers, all in the same medium where the original paper was published. Science may not need public approval, but it implicitly relies on it. Taking the whole process down to the level of the lowest common denominator is not a good idea.
For the notion of 'protecting' ones work, people could "publish" to a location that does not display the work, but archives it. In cases where it's feared somebody may have stolen an idea from somebody (which in my experience is so phenomenally rare as to be mostly irrelevant) they would have a public means of verification/dating and receiving correct attribution.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 02 2017, @04:35AM
Except for esotericism, which lately became quite popular.
Along with chia, quinoa, paleo- and low-carb- diets.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Monday October 02 2017, @04:54AM (4 children)
I am impressed whenever I come across a paper that explains everything (in a more complex field) in plain English. Some papers also have a simpler summary of the contents after the abstract.
It doesn't seem like the public is harmed by preprints. The very few people and scientists interested in the topic can read it and may judge for themselves whether they think the contents are accurate, or even conduct the same experiment/observations. There seems to be a lot of astronomy preprints, for example, and they could cause some people to point their telecopes at certain objects. No harm done.
Once in a while, a preprint or yet-to-be-published article actually leads to media coverage. Particularly controversial ones on CRISPR topics, and NASA's EmDrive which was highly anticipated. In those cases a lot of attention is paid to it and you might see some kind of informal peer review, like the string of rebuttals mentioned in TFS. If normal unverified studies are leading to crap media coverage, I'd guess it's because of some university putting out a press release, leading other outlets to copy and reword it.
Preprints can also serve another purpose: allowing a non-paywalled version to become freely available. The preprint could be identical to the peer-reviewed article.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @06:29AM (3 children)
The thing with pre-prints is that invariably one (or more) containing mistakes float around the Interwebs forever. Case in point - I submitted an article, it was accepted and pre-print went online before proofing. During proof I found a horrible error in the equations, which I was able to fix. However both versions are floating on the internet.
Also NIH sponsored work must be published via another portal with its own (very limited) proofing tools. I couldn't fix the equations and the site refused to accept my amended document, so after a couple months I had to press "Accept with no changes" under pain of our grants being rescinded. Another version on the internet :) Enjoy!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by moondrake on Monday October 02 2017, @08:32AM (2 children)
Well..
a while ago I read a horrible published work because the reviewers did not check (or understand) the math (I talked to them).
It should not have passed a good review, but it did, and I like to believe a preprint would have been better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @11:22AM (1 child)
In fact, that sounds like your average scientific paper. Barely any novel content, barely supported by evidence and 12 authors, barely any of whom contributed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @01:15PM
stop poking the bare.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @08:03AM
I see you made an effort to think about this, but I disagree.
Peer review wasn't really established until the sixties and seventies.
It was certainly quite rare before the second world war, see here this bit about Einstein in 1936: http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.2117822. [scitation.org]
A few hundred years ago, scientists literally communicated by letters to each other.
I assume "Annals" (or annuals) appeared as a way to make these letters easier to reference.
Peer review today still has a fuzzy definition.
Ten years ago I was told that as a reviewer I just have to make sure the paper is not crack-pot science and other people are able to understand enough to refute or confirm the results, or reproduce the experiment in the case of experimental sciences.
Today I'm being told that in principle I have to make sure they looked at previous literature properly, paper is well-written, I am able to understand the analytic proofs, basically demanding a lot more of my time.
The point of preprint servers is exactly a proof of authorship.
They are called "preprints" because they are representations of the work before going to print, which can be taken to mean "before peer review".
I believe the initial point of arXiv was to let scientists talk to each other without waiting for the excruciatingly slow journals.
I think average time from submission to publication may have been something like 6 months ore more when arXiv first came along.
If you are worried about the public misinterpreting preprints, I don't think you should.
It is our job to educate them.
Anyone who is willing to ask a scientist will understand in 5 minutes why preprints cannot be seen as settled science.
If journalists ignore this, the solution is to make them have a better code of conduct, not for us to censor ourselves.
Scientists are not supposed to hide the inner working of science from the public, they are supposed to be as open as possible, so that the public can trust them.
If there are fights, let them see the fights.
If they don't like the fights, let them complain, and we will explain why the fights happen.
We're definitely more civilized than politicians and actors, and they're perfectly fine with those idiots fighting with each other.