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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, 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.