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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: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday October 02 2017, @05:36PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Monday October 02 2017, @05:36PM (#576010)

    I see a lot of people answering a different question than the one posed. Comments advocate either for all first drafts to be made publicly available or for research to continue appearing in journals as the source of truth.

    But that doesn't answer the question, which was "Should Scientists Be Posting Their Work Online Before Peer Review?" (emphasis mine).

    My answer to that question is yes. The process described in the summary sounds like crowd-sourced peer review happening out in the open. How is this bad, as long as we still end up with a collection of peer-reviewed papers in the journals?

    The only concern would be if laypeople came across the rough drafts and tried to make news out of them. Anybody who is willing to and capable of sifting through the firehose of papers going through a place like bioRxiv is by definition not a layperson, so I don't see that argument holding water.

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    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
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