(August 29, 2018 at 9:08 am)RoadRunner79 Wrote:(August 29, 2018 at 8:49 am)Mathilda Wrote: It's still better than not having any peer review. As Aoi Magi points out, peer review is a continual process. It happens before a paper gets published, and this is a very useful step. But once it is published, it's opened up to a much wider audience of scientists who can then look for evidence for and against and come up with competing hypotheses and explanations. This is also a form of peer review.
Just because two or three scientists have read a paper and accepted it doesn't mean that the paper is also accepted by the wider scientific community. As for politics, you get it every where. But if the methodology is correct then most will accept a paper for publication even if they do not agree with it because they are also aware that they might be wrong and the scientific community needs all the evidence to analyse.
Problems with repeatability are not due to the scientific method but economic considerations. Scientists are judged according to metrics and this translates to how well they are funded. For example if you try to reproduce some results and find that you cannot, the more prestigious journals like Nature won't be so keen to publish them as novel research because they are looking to increase their sales. The study can be still get published elsewhere but because scientists are judged by the impact factor of where they publish this hurts their funding. So there is less incentive to reproduce other people's work to check that it is correct.
So then, most of the peer review happens outside of and really apart from the publishing process.
I did not say that in the slightest.
(August 29, 2018 at 9:08 am)RoadRunner79 Wrote: My disagreement is mostly when people over-emphasize only the publishing part of the process as the be all, end all. I do believe that it could be better, if it was more transparent, and we could know why it was rejected.
How could it be more transparent? Reviews write reviews. It's what they do. They will tell you why a paper was rejected. Normally for very good reasons. The author takes the comments on board, writes a better paper and then resubmits it again, or to another conference / journal. Sometimes it's not that the science is bad but you haven't managed to communicate the ideas effectively. Science is built upon the communication of ideas and results.
(August 29, 2018 at 9:08 am)RoadRunner79 Wrote: It's understandable that a journal can pick what it wishes to publish, but it may not always be for problems with the research as you point out. It seems that some are skipping the publishing process all together, and sharing their information in more open platforms to begin with or along with submitting it to a journal. It's faster, cheaper, and less red tape to get to the wider audience for evaluation. I think that you are going to see more of this in the future. The politics and push to publish, I think is leading to cheap science, and hurtful to the field.
It depends on the field. For example, checking your own results can be extremely difficult and you may want to get other people's help checking for any flaws before it is published. This leads to stronger science. Considering the amount of time and effort that goes into writing a paper, no one wants to risk retracting a paper or finding a mistake in it that was easily missed.
Also, because publishers have turned the whole process into such a cash cow without adding anything useful to the process, many scientists are trying to bypass them all together. This means that there is more money available to do more science.
