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Should Scientists Be Posting Their Work Online Before Peer Review?

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

AnonTechie writes:

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

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @06:29AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @06:29AM (#575783)

    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my amended document, so after a couple months I had to press "Accept with no changes" under pain of our grants being rescinded.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!

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by moondrake on Monday October 02 2017, @08:32AM (2 children)

    by moondrake (2658) on Monday October 02 2017, @08:32AM (#575819)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @11:22AM (#575854)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @01:15PM (#575879)

        stop poking the bare.