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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 ??


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @08:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @08:03AM (#575808)

    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.

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