Posted on 12/18/2007 7:17:20 AM PST by GodGunsGuts
Web Journals Threaten Peer-Review System
Sunday, October 01, 2006
By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer
LOS ANGELES — Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online.
Instead of having a group of hand-picked scholars review research in secret before publication, a growing number of Internet-based journals are publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by the authors'peers. It's then up to rank-and-file researchers to debate the value of the work in cyberspace.
The Web journals are threatening to turn on its head the traditional peer-review system that for decades has been the established way to pick apart research before it's made public.
Next month, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Public Library of Science will launch its first open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE, focusing on science and medicine. Like its sister publications, it will make research articles available for free online by charging authors to publish....
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
bump
ping :o)
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. What a human shame that when you give people authority, they spend most of their time trying to keep it. Same problem with the FDA, IMHO - they’re more interested in controlling for control’s sake than in approving drugs and procedures that work.
Gatekeepers are the death of knowledge... this is great news.
==Gatekeepers are the death of knowledge... this is great news.
Amen to that. I hope to see more science sites like PLoS ONE!
==Same problem with the FDA
Not to mention being riddled with scandal and corruption, such as granting drug monopolies to the good old boys.
There have always been non-peer-reviewed journals, and there are now plenty of peer-reviewed online jourals. I submitted my last paper to a peer reviewed online journal.
This article is scare-mongering from commercial publishers who have gotten their content and editorial work done for free by academicians for years, and are now facing a revolt after their greed led them to jack up prices (charged mostly to the universities which actually pay the content providers and editors (I include referees, since in any other sort of publishing, peer-review would be considered editing work)) to proverbially astronomical levels.
Two major mathematics journals (Topology and K-Theory) whose publishers engaged in predatory pricing practics had their entire editorial boards resign, and start new journals published by the London Mathematical Society at reasonable prices. The Max Planck Institute cancelled all subscriptions to Springer-Verlag journals because the publisher insisted on outrageous pricing and licensing terms and wouldn’t back down.
Online journals, published by the universities, professional societies, and small groups of scientists, are the wave of the future (though I hope someone prints out archive copies here and there lest and EMP serve as a new Library of Alexandria fire). But the ones that will get respect will be peer reviewed.
Someone should send a copy of the story “The Goose that Laid the Golden-Egg” to the CEO’s of Springer, Elsevier, Sage, and about a dozen other scientific publishing houses.
Not sure about the power part. I've been a peer reviewer for a lot of papers over the years for different journals and conferences. It's mostly a big hassle. You don't get paid. And if you do a good job, it takes a lot of time. It's really something you contribute for the good of the community.
About the only benefit is you get to see some of the good new stuff before it's public. But you have to wade thru a bunch of crap to see it.
Alicia should read through a few threads on FR. The peer review process here is brutal - but effective.
As an author in both types of forums, I believe it is a mixed blessing.
Open access is great in that the information is more widely available. But remeber the JOURNALS and PUBLISHERS of them still control the process and they are largely “for profit”. In the past scientist could publish for free. But now, the charge are all on scietists’s back. The fees presently charged to authors (sometimes in the thousands of dollar er paper) can be very high and may restrict publishing to those with grant money to throw around. So we can begin to worry about what might not be published due to lack of excess grant money.
Maybe the “peer reviewed” journals shouldn’t have abandoned the scientific method to support leftism.
LONG OVERDUE.
Peer review is not perfect but it cleans up some of the garbage. I've shot down papers on grounds that they're wrong, or too insignificant to justify publication. Peer review helps ensure the authors have done all the controls and calibrations needed to prove their results. Peer review also helps get rid of ambiguities and unclear statements -- editing work but editing by a technical expert, not some ignorant English major.
Why?
I mean I know nothing about the way these Journals and Publishers work but I do know the average teenage boy with a few bucks can create a web site.
Perhaps rather then a web site dedicated to a single disipline a web site more like the way FreeRepublic is set up. There could be catagories, and the author would "post their research" and open it up for comment.
There are several different ways you could control who could comment or allow anyone.
Of course there would be some cost involved, a moderator to take out the trash on occasions, the cost of the server and the internet connection but if the information was valuable enough interested people would support it (again like FreeRepublic).
I’m not sure what your saying. Are web journals that bypass the peer review system a good thing or a bad thing in your opinion?
==Maybe the “peer reviewed” journals shouldn’t have abandoned the scientific method to support leftism.
That is one very good reason (among many) why it is a good thing to bypass the stranglehold peer review has on the ideology of science.
==Peer review is not perfect but it cleans up some of the garbage.
Peer review is also being used to censor good science that conflicts with entrenched interests and paradigms. How do we solve this problem, save providing a way for scientists to do an end-run around the establishment?
Perhaps, but there needs to be a way for scientists to go around the peer review process in order to challenge entrenched interests. For instance, what is a scientist to do when his competitors are assigned to review his work? You do know this happens, right? For instance, look at all the scientists who have openly declared that the debate over human-caused global warming is over. What do you think would happen if one or more of these scientists were reviewing the work of a scientist who challenges human-caused global warming?
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