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Another Slew of Science Papers Retracted Because of Fraud
schwit1 writes: A major scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals after discovering that the so-called independent peer reviewers for these articles were fabricated by the authors themselves. From the article: "The cull comes after similar discoveries of 'fake peer review' by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing 'reviews from fabricated reviewers'. The practice can occur when researchers submitting a paper for publication suggest reviewers, but supply contact details for them that actually route requests for review back to the researchers themselves." Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field. In total, more than a 100 papers have been retracted, simply because the journals relied on the authors to provide them contact information for their reviewers, never bothering to contact them directly.
When so many news stories about scientific papers being faked are published, it gives all the wackos ammo. They see this and start yelling about global warming and autism from innoculations. Blah. Publishers, get your act together!
"Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field" No, it indicates sloppiness & laziness from these awful journals. The "peer-review field" (science) is still working just fine.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I have written a paper that conclusively proves that there is absolutely no fraud within the field of academic publishing within the biomedical field. It was peer reviewed by no fewer than sixty of my peers (who definitely aren't me making up names) and is absolutely concrete in its findings... provided you don't look too hard at my evidence. Clearly, anyone who says there is fraud within the biomed field is in fact fraudulent themselves.
Also, I take checks, Visa, and Mastercard, but no Amex.
Academics submit articles to journals for free. Other academics provide feedback and do quality control for the submitted articles, also for free. Yet more academics peer review the submitted articles, you guessed it, for free. Logistics are handled by a board of volunteer academics. I guess the journal staff... typeset the cover and table of contents, print the journal, and maintain the website? The typesetting is probably automated, actually.
Out of curiosity I checked the pricing on the Journal of Algebra, probably the most prestigious journal in my field. An individual subscription is $291. A 5-person e-journal subscription is $2,070.67. An institutional paper subscription is $5,314.
I guess they're too busy raking in money hand over first to bother trying to find independent reviewers.
The same claim you make about wacko's having ammo works in both directions. People on the side you believe to have the better opinions use the same papers as their "proof" for what ever they want.
People quote mythical 'facts' regularly. Today I heard yet another bonehead talking about the alleged "Rape Culture" at college which uses a 40 year old bullshit study for it's statistics. Not because we can't do better studies, but because the numbers in that particular study favor the bullshit they want you to believe.
Not very much "Science" relates to pure black or pure white answers. In fact the majority of science is trying to figure out what shade of gray something is. The most difficult task is to figure out your own biases, and in a world that puts "feelings" over correctness.. we are getting what we should.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field." To me, this is outright fraud, not carelessness or sloth on the part of the contributors.
You are right, but you are also wrong.
There are many Scientists, even many in Academia, who don't Publish. I've got a co-author on a few Papers, but it never meant much in over three decades of Performance Reviews.
I was a Working Scientist. It's very much like being a Working Actor- a face seen briefly a few dozen times over a career, but never a Leading Role. Still, it paid the bills.
You are an utter asshole for promoting the "Publish or Perish" myth. It is simply not true.
But you are quite right about Killing the Market.
This is about Ideas. There shouldn't _be_ a Market for sharing Idea; that's a Middleman concept.
Middlemen- kill them all.
Let's first start with Shakespeare's recommendation- Lawyers.
And then we can go after the for-profit Academic Publishers.
Oh, I love this Captcha: anodes
This is a big deal. I submit articles to these publishers, and this is outrageous. The idea that I would give email addresses to editors that came back to me in order to review my own papers not only never occurred to me, it seems like it would require a researcher with absolutely no ethics or morals whatsoever. The entire peer review process needs to be revamped from the ground up, and I think it would benefit science to have an open comment period on submitted articles or something similar. Authors should not be able to suggest reviewers, and both authors and reviewer should know who each other are, and interact as the paper goes through review. The absurd situation now where the reviewer knows who the authors are, but not visa versa, and where there is extremely limited interaction, mostly in the form of reviewer critiques that are often off-base but nonetheless accepted by editors, is not acceptable. A more interactive system is required, possibly with crowd-commenting for a limited time. The idea that the reviewers on high end papers were giving "reviewer contacts" to editors that went back to them is insane. I guess this is what money and desperation does to people.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
The review system is deeply flawed as it stands now. Cronyism, favoritism, and punitive harassment run rampant. Since experts in your field are often people who review your papers its not uncommon to be rejected out of spite or to let a competitor publish first. The competition isn't just fierce it's underhanded and extraordinarily wasteful in terms lost money and lost brainpower.
You don't need to publish to work as a scientist, but it is something that is important to do in order to get tenure in many schools and as you said, is the way to be a leading scientist. And if you're working towards that sort of leading role, you're the type of person who would be publishing to begin with.
As you said, you didn't have to publish, and many don't, but the ones who do publish are often the ones under the most pressure to do so, for whatever reason. This means that the people who have an important part to play in the scientific world are also the most likely to have a reason to misrepresent their results or strive to be underhanded to avoid actual peer review.
What is the upside for a working scientist to misrepresent their results? A better review? Even then, you probably get reviewed more for your investigative technique or your experimental or apparatus design. Which means that you'd get just as good a review for being good at knocking down novel hypotheses as you would for sustaining them. In other words, you'd get a good review for being a good scientist.
A leading scientist is under a lot more pressure to offer something that they can publish which gets themselves or their labs more grant money so that research can continue. Like you, they are valued if they are good at science and falsifying hypotheses, but grants are usually offered for new, interesting science. Knocking over your own bad hypotheses is necessary, but you have to have something to offer in the meantime.
Some researchers end up with nothing they can offer, and they realize that, but they can't pay the bills with all negative results. So they peer review their own work to keep the grants coming. This is no doubt done in the hope that their faith in their hypothesis is rewarded and that they will be able to produce a return on investment, but there are certainly other reasons for that.
Publish or perish is real, it's just not real for everyone who calls themselves a scientist. However, it is a real problem for the scientific community, because grant money and prestige is what keeps academic scientists working. No doubt you would be fine, albeit at a different school or lab, but you and your ilk are not the problem, your bosses and senior researchers are the ones at risk.
I don't want to defend academic publishers here. I have heard many uncomplimentary things about them. The thing is, the middlemen aren't the ones falsifying the peer review recommendations, the scientists are. And there's really only one reason for that: they don't want to go through the peer review process. That's a *science* problem and it must be solved by *scientists*.
If the peer review process for journals does not work, then the scientists on the editorial boards need to stand up and work out a better method. An academic journal isn't worth wiping your ass with if the scientists involved with it refuse to endorse it. And that is what they need to do. Policy makers and laypeople tend to trust scientists in general in a manner that some trust their priests. In fact, these days, a lot more than priests.
However, that is all based on faith and trust, as they are not doing the experiments themselves. Scientists need to work at maintaining the trust they have in their field as a whole or it provides the ammunition to either distrust science or to encourage misrepresentation of results for certain unscientific aims.
The idea that I would give email addresses to editors that came back to me in order to review my own papers not only never occurred to me, it seems like it would require a researcher with absolutely no ethics or morals whatsoever.
Well, true; a certain proportion of any group are likely to be liars, cheats, parasites etc. I'm not sure about the complete lack of ethics or morals, though - it is not difficult to imagine a path from 'excusable inaccuracies' to full blown fraud, and when you're measured on the volume of articles rather than the quality of your research, then it isn't surprising that you may occasionally start taking shortcuts to make your results look better. The thing is, when you have taken the first step down that slippery road, it quickly becomes impossible to turn back without your whole career exploding in your face - so you carry on.
I think we need not just a better way to manage reasearch results - peer review comes from a time when scientists were few and far between, and when most of them came from the upper crust of society, where concepts like honour were literally beaten into them at school with a blunt instrument. I don't suggest a return to that, of course, but I think a rigorous course in ethics for students of science would be a place to start. Not so much to instill some sort of unthinking adherence to a code of conduct, but to teach people to reason and think critically about these issues before they are in a situation where the pressure tempts them to make the wrong decision.