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New Top Tier Science Journal Announced
Shipud writes "The Max Planck society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Wellcome Trust have announced their plans for a new journal for biomedical and life science research to be launched summer 2012. From the joint press release: 'The journal will employ an open and transparent peer review process in which papers will be accepted or rejected as rapidly as possible, generally with only one round of revisions, and with limited need for modifications or additional experiments. For transparency, reviewers' comments will be published anonymously.' The journal will be online-only and open access too, and they promise 'an opportunity to create a journal and article format that will exploit the potential of new technologies to allow for improved data presentation.' Especially valuable is the 'limited need for modifications or additional experiments,' especially since even Nature has recently published a scathing opinion piece about reviewers' almost reflexive demands for additional experiments from manuscript authors."
Paging Dr. Bob, paging Dr. Bob.
Please pick up the red courtesy phone...
...whether or not it's a "top tier" journal will surely depend on the quality of the submissions.
To whom? It's not exactly a design decision, regardless of who your backers are.
Allowing anonymous comments should help this journal achieve the "top tier" status the owners want. Look at what it's done for slashdot!
Trolling is a art,
Not really. The normal system is a brick wall, not a window. It's like knocking a hole in the wall and putting a new, frosted window in. Anonymity is an important part of the peer review process, else everybody would be too busy worrying about their reputations and careers to be honest.
Anonymity is an important part of the peer review process, else everybody would be too busy worrying about their reputations and careers to be honest.
Honesty is apparently a small part of those reputations then.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reviewers are anonymous. Reviewers usually being researchers in the same field as the subject matter of said paper. I highly doubt creationists qualify.
It's more of a double-blind thing in the review process. Helps with neutrality as neither the reputation of the submitter nor of the reviewer gets into the way. Honesty is one thing, but scientists are also human. Getting a chain of negative reviews from one person you can identify will hardly leave you in the position of neutrally reviewing them later, as hard as you may try.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
For real transparency they should demand inclusion of all code and raw data used during the study. If reviewers can't reproduce (starting with only the appropriate COTS software) the numbers in the paper on their own machine, no publication.
I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that most journals currently don't publish the reviewer comments at all.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"For transparency, reviewers' comments will be published anonymously."
Where is the "transparency" in this?
"Especially valuable is the 'limited need for modifications or additional experiments,' especially since even Nature has recently published a scathing opinion piece about reviewers' almost reflexive demands for additional experiments from manuscript authors."
Having worked in research labs I know for a fact that this is a strategy to delay publication by competitors. Reviewers most often do resaerch in the same fieled as the authors of the article and, while the reviewers are anonymous, the authors are not. What some reviewers do is, they assign a postdoc to work on the project while leveraging the data in the manuscript. Then they make sure the article will not be published any time soon by asking for more data and/or additional experiments to be performed. This strategy is even more efficient if the reviewers are "authorities" in their fields.
nothing "top tier" ever gets announced. Something becomes top tier because it proofs itself to be top tier.
While that's certainly a danger, you're misinterpreting. Access to the content of the papers is open. The reviewer's comments are anonymous. Access to being a reviewer and selection of being a reviewer for a particular paper is not open. Compare this to the normal peer review process, where the reviewers are selected and their comments aren't available at all: here, the only thing that's different is the comments are available, but with the name of the reviewer redacted.
Today the physical costs of publishing online are minimal, so peer review should really focus on novel procceses in experiments and interesting results from valid experiments, not micromanaging.
Peer review is a hack that resulted from the rapid growth of scientific publication in the 20th century, along with the finite resources available for print journals.
It isn't clear to me that it has any place in the online world.
Dreadful as it sounds, /. is closer to the optimal form of online journal than most online journals, which seem to be trying to emulate the limitations of paper journals as closely as possible. Given that everything is published (made public) in arxiv.org anyway, the notion that some journals can meaningfully act as gatekeepers of scientific quality is absurd. The only thing they do is more-or-less arbitrarily filter things according to editorial and referee prejudice, despite our best efforts.
Early numbers of the Proceedings of the Royal Society are full of garbage--Robert Hooke describing a deformed calf that was born near his home, and the like. That didn't stop the progress of science then, and it won't stop the progress of science now if we open the gates to a wider range of people. Good work will still stand out--eventually--without the blessings of "high impact" journals, whose papers are not notably more correct, or even more interesting, in the long run, than those in 2nd (but probably not 3rd) tier publications.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Not to mention you can find endless accounts of where scientists absolutely refuse to either conduct research or worse, review research, because the topic is considered "tainted", either by subject matter or researcher association. For almost two decades now scientists have been complaining of not only a broken scientific review process, but that it in of it self is used to bias who obtains research grants. The whole fiend of fusion research is typical.
In a nutshell, the the exception of a small priest hood, scientific research has been widely regarded as broken, dishonest, politically driven, and jaded, such that it largely serves the priest hood moreso than anyone else.
This is the natural swing of the pendulum to fight back against the priest hood's corruption. Chances are, its not that hard to identify members of the priest hood, and in doing so, identify those who have consistently manipulated the system for the benefit of themselves and their cronies, to the detriment of science and humanity as a whole.
I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that most journals currently don't publish the reviewer comments at all.
They don't publish them, but they are almost always provided to the manuscript authors upon editorial decision - with any identifying information redacted, of course. I've definitely read some papers where I wished the reviewer comments were public (usually because the papers had massive, gaping flaws), but I understand (and largely agree with) the reasons why this isn't done.
On the other hand, I really would like to see comments enabled for all online journals - even if it's anonymous, it's still an improvement over no comments at all.
Actually, it does somewhat work here. For example, when I read articles about KDE, I still track the ppl that I knew for the KDE site as well as other OSS advocates have good comments. Likewise, another area of interest is space, so, I have to know about 5 ppl here that are not just tuned in, but work the industry.
/. solves this by allowing moderaters. This new site will hopefully give more weight to those that are within a field as opposed to allowing just anybody to comment with equal weight. But /. solves this DIFFERENTLY. We have meta-mods that can moderate the mods. That is not a bad idea. It allows for us to overall track ppl that have intelligent comments. What it does not do, is discern the difference amongst posters/moderators, but that also has advantages.
Take the example of one guy (we will call Q) in the space arena. Normally, he is pretty good, but that is because he is working int he field. Yet, I spotted a time when Q was going through some personal issues and was just plain HARSH on ppl. His comments went off-topic and were just slamming ppl. With time, he settled back into his usual good comments, but for a while there, I was AC talking to him (telling him to log out or go to sleep), or even modding him down. I did not want to, but Q's attacks were WAY off base. But the anonymous moderator allowed this feature. Yet, you could see that the guy had been up 24 hours straight, yet, that was not his normal pattern (I had never seen him post every couple of hours before).
Point is, that this system DOES work, but it has its flaws. The real question are, how will this science journal do this, which scientists will use it, which will moderate, and who will read it? It really COULD be decent. It could also be like Faux news, Pravada, National Enquirer, China Daily, etc and just plain sux by targeting idiots with propaganda (welcome trust came to my attention)..
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The last article talks about how difficult it is to get back reviewer's comments demanding additional work, and says that is a problem.
The thing is, I don't see "Nature" or other top-tier journals hurting for lack of submissions. If reviewers are being unreasonably critical, then why are people still submitting there? It's because they're willing to work hard to get a nature paper on their CV. Blaming top-tier journals for being choosy when researchers are willing to to go through it at any cost is a bit backwards.
In my opinion, the better approach would be for researchers to put less emphasis on top-tier publications. It's a piss-poor way of judging how good a researcher is. That has more to do with politics, funding, the number of people willing to work on your project, and ultimately luck than it does with hard work or good results. If you're working in a lab by yourself, doing the whole project by yourself, and publish valid results in a 3rd tier journal, that's a more impressive individual than if you had an army of people doing all the hard work, get stunning results, and publish in a first tier journal. I think that author dilution is under estimated.
It is of course simpler to say "Oh, that's a good journal, he must be a good scientist" than it is to judge that researcher's research as a whole, which is the only reason people do it.