Academic publishing: a discussion

I thought it might be useful to group our discussions and comments on academic publishing. This includes the role of scientific journals, the relevance of peer review, the use of preprints etc.

I thought this comment on Twitter was interesting:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1226136111409500160

 

@Michiel Tack I would agree that it would be useful to have a way of grouping such threads together. Recently we have had quite a lot of threads addressing publishing and publishing ethics.

Would the best way of doing this be to create a separate ‘Forum’ under the “Other News and Research” heading?

 

I notice that biorxiv, the preprint server for biology, has added a note saying:

 

Was listening to this 2016 podcast "Everything Herz: 17: Journals: Do we need them?" and they mentioned that in physics and mathematics it is common for researchers to just publish their article on their academic profile where it gets a DOI, so without journals as an intermediary.

They also mentioned the interesting option that large funders of researcher could act as an academic publisher - they have put the money in and so have an interest that results are reported correctly. These would largely be public-funded institutions like the NIH but their option to publish would then be open to all, like clinicaltrials.gov, which is also funded by the NIH but researchers from all over the world can register their trial there if I understand correctly.

 

LA Times article - "Column: COVID-19 could kill the for-profit science publishing model. That would be a good thing"
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-03-03/covid-19-open-science

 

Wow, if only. That would be one silver lining at least!

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1236071751643062272

 

Merged thread

A short article on peer review

‘Nothing like what the public think it is’: Peter Ridd on the truth about climate change and ‘peer review’

Edit : The article doesn't actually mention climate change, it only discusses peer review.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/0...e-truth-about-climate-change-and-peer-review/

 

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/11/bla-bla-bla-peer-review-bla-bla-bla/

 

Surgisphere scandal: Lancet still doesn’t get it

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia....candal-legacy-media-lancet-still-dont-get-it/

mentions this NYT article

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/health/virus-journals.html

 

So this gives retraction an important role since peer review is inadequate. But that is broken when retraction is rejected even after evidence of egregious fraud with explicit intent to mislead. As fitting for the Lancet PACE paper as it is for Cochrane, where numerous flaws were identified during the review process and not a single one was actually addressed but now, oops, too late, can't retract.

And especially breaks when the editor-in-chief is party to the deception. And the "professional skeptics" don't care because they are content that the fraud validates their beliefs.

What a failure this guy is. Hell, it seems every British medical journal is incapable of performing their function since they do the same: give cover to politicized outright fraud and help in the cover-up.

Break down the whole system. It's an industry. It is failing. It has failed. Break it down entirely and rebuild a functional system in its place.