Peer Review Ring Broken - 60 Articles Retracted

blackbeak (1227080) writes The Washington Post reports that the Journal of Vibration and Control's review system was hijacked by a ring of reviewers. 60 articles have been retracted as a result. "After a 14-month investigation, JVC determined the ring involved “aliases” and fake e-mail addresses of reviewers — up to 130 of them — in an apparently successful effort to get friendly reviews of submissions and as many articles published as possible by Chen and his friends.'On at least one occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he created,' according to the SAGE announcement."

Comments

Re:Wish I could say I was surprised

[Karmashock]

1. I'm not interested in being brow beaten by some fool more interested in winning an argument then in addressing the argument.

If you're going to keep attempting an ad hominem then I'm going to simply not talk to you. And then what will you have accomplished?

This is the internet... be nice or you're getting a flame war.

2. Scientists are paid. You missed the whole point about not assuming that i am defending the current system but rather talking about the problem that the current system was set up to deal with and that will need to be dealt with if we get rid of the current system.

The point is that money goes to scientists and the people that provide that money have a right to expect something be done with it.

Furthermore, they must share information... you don't like the term publish or you're going to get asinine on the issue? fine... We'll start using other words. I'll speak chinese if I need to get you to stop trying to make this a semantics debate.

3. I'm not talking about any journal in particular. They're all suspect because there's no uniform way of doing this and the journals themselves are not audited which is another problem.

4. I specifically said that if it were not practical then the paper gets a big red asterisk next to it's name that says "unverified" or "not reproduced" or whatever.

By all means... put out as much research as you want that no one could possibly verify or reproduce. Make my fucking day. But it gets the red asterisk.

Peers will take that in stride because it won't be that uncommon. But laymen will at least understand what has and has not be verified. That is important. Science cannot be something only scientists understand any more then the law can be something only lawyers understand.

You do that and you create a situation where everyone has to walk around telling each other to "trust" them... and guess what... humans don't work that way.

I don't trust the guy at the bank when he says "oh this home loan is the best for you... I swear"... I don't trust the lawyer that says "oh this is a good contract, sign it"... I don't trust the doctor that says "you don't need a second opinion, get this operation."

And I'm certainly not going to let the scientists get away with a similar argument.

its not acceptable.

So things need to be structured in a reasonable way so that scientists find the process reasonable, those providing funds know that their money isn't being wasted, and the public can use the resulting science without having to just take on faith something some guy said.

doubtless you're going to try and argue that we have to trust them because its just too complicated. I'm not interested in that discussion. My opinion is no. End of that tangent.

6. As to the money to reproduce it, that can be provided by the same institutions that hire the scientists in the first place as part of their quality control policy. Which is in large part what all of this in the first place.

Would that money go to the same scientist or the same type of scientists? Probably not. We might have specialists that ONLY reproduce other people's work. That might be literally all they do. And they might be paid by the scientists that produced the paper who are themselves taking the money from their grants or working budgets as a cost of publishing.

here you'll tell me they don't have enough money to do that... well obviously not because they didn't need to do that before so they weren't given the money to do that.

I'm anticipating the circular arguments from you because you demonstrated several of them above and its making my head throb.