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| == A response to a text regarding peer review in the [http://www.badscience.net/2009/09/medical-hypotheses-fails-the-aids-test/ Bad Science blog] == | | == A response to a [http://www.badscience.net/2009/09/medical-hypotheses-fails-the-aids-test/ Bad Science blog] text touching peer review== |
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| This response does not explicitly consider any single article or journal, but attempts to provide some fresh ideas in regard to the common current practice of peer review in scientific publishing.
| | If we think of a typical article, it consists of two parts: first, a description of the study design and the data obtained; second, interpretations of the results and discussion in a wider context. The first part is permanent in time, as the observed data does not change. In contrast, making interpretations is a social activity (involving also other researchers than the original authors), and it will change in time (sometimes dramatically). |
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| We are researchers in the field of environmental health and work on developing open practices to creation and use of scientifically sound knowledge on issues relevant to environment and health. In our work of developing methods and tools to facilitate open, ideally unlimited, collaboration on knowledge creation, dissemination and use, we have come to identify important shortcomings in the currently dominant practice of publishing scientific information as peer reviewed articles in scientific journals.
| | Only the first part should be archived in a frozen, article-type form. These could well be published first and peer reviewed only later, as is the current practice in some fields of science (see http://arxiv.org/). |
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| # Articles in many journals, including several with high impact factors, are only available to those who subscribe to the journal or purchase the specific article. In addition, long review and publication processes as well as copyright issues often prevent scientists from publishing their findings openly. Despite the recent increase in open access journals and quickened review processes, the reality of scientific publishing is still far from the ideals of scientific openness.
| | The second part, interpretations, should be dealt with in open workspaces designed for mass collaboration. There are methods to effectively organise these discussions to achieve convergence. To give one example, see pragma-dialectics in Wikipedia. These methods are still under-utilised (this blog is a typical example). |
| # Scientific meriting based on the number of publications, and the impact factor of publishing journals, tends to direct scientists to write manuscripts conforming to the consensual view to things and proposing only incremental changes to the current knowledge base, in order to make the peer-reviewers show green light. Thereby, although the practice of peer review itself does not necessarily suppress new and provocative ideas, the meriting practice makes scientists themselves to suppress them. It also directs scientists to keep their data to themselves, instead of providing it for open use, in order to maximize their personal merit by maximizing the amount of publications based on the data under their own name(s). Furthermore, it promotes making science for science, rather than science for society, making a significant proportion of scientific information redundant, excluding the nominal merit it creates.
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| # The practice of considering a journal article as the basic unit of scientific information is somewhat misleading, as it diverts the focus too much on things like who did the study and where was it published, instead of what is the result and what evidence and reasoning is there, and what conclusions can be drawn from it? Furthermore, journal articles are static objects that once published, do not develop further. Further development on the issue requires creating new and new articles that overlap and replicate what already existed in the previous articles. As articles considering more or less the same issue can be widely dispersed both in time and across the whole range of different scientific journals, the information base created by the currently dominant publication practice can not be described as anything else than fragmented.
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| We do not have perfect and complete ready-made solutions to the problems we describe above, but there are some known possible alternative approaches that could be pursued in publishing scientific information.
| | As an example, let's look at the current discussion raised by Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick. If their interpretations are on shaky grounds, they could have easily been shot down in an open workspace, without any need of editorial decisions. In an open workspace, anyone could publish their statements (idea promoted by Bruce G Charlton) and all statements incoherent with facts would be invalidated (idea promoted by Ben Goldacre) by peers. There is no need to remove invalid statements, because they are shown to be invalid. On the contrary, it prevents from repeating invalid statements. |
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| # One possibility is to apply the "publish first, review later" principle, as is already done in physics and some related fields of science ([http://arxiv.org/ arXiv]). Open publication policy speeds up the process of getting new ideas out in the open and poses no unnecessary need of suppressing ideas in fear of being rejected. When complemented with a review and evaluation process that addresses articles already published, also the scientific quality of publications becomes controlled and scientific merit awarded to those who deserve it.
| | A paradigm shift to open scientific workspaces has at least two major problems. It is not clear how scientists could get merit from participating in mass collaboration instead of writing articles. In addition, this might cause problems to the business logic of scientific journals. |
| # A further step could be to start publishing contributions, reasonings, and evidence on an issue- rather that study-basis. This would require changing the basic unit of publication into "issue" or "phenomenon", rather than "article", and changing the publication media from journals to web-based information bases/workspaces where information is collected and synthesized and collective knowledge is created on an issue-basis in iterative processes.
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| Changes in the scientific meriting system are necessary if we are to get over the shortcomings incurred by the current publication practices. Different kinds of options are available depending on how radical changes we can imagine to take place in the world of scientific publishing.
| | We have drafted a procedure description for a journal that is based on the ideas briefly described above: Opasnet Journal (http://en.opasnet.org/w/Opasnet_Journal). |
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| * If going for the "publish first, review later" practice, ...
| | :Mikko Pohjola |
| * If taking the scientific publishing towards knowledge sharing and creation in collaborative web-based workspaces would bring about interesting opportunities to reconfigure the meriting system. Keeping track of contributions by different users is a trivial task in wiki-like systems. Individual contributions and their impact on improving the piece of information it relates to could be evaluated
| | :Jouni Tuomisto |
| | :environmental health scientists |
| | :THL, Finland |
A response to a Bad Science blog text touching peer review
If we think of a typical article, it consists of two parts: first, a description of the study design and the data obtained; second, interpretations of the results and discussion in a wider context. The first part is permanent in time, as the observed data does not change. In contrast, making interpretations is a social activity (involving also other researchers than the original authors), and it will change in time (sometimes dramatically).
Only the first part should be archived in a frozen, article-type form. These could well be published first and peer reviewed only later, as is the current practice in some fields of science (see http://arxiv.org/).
The second part, interpretations, should be dealt with in open workspaces designed for mass collaboration. There are methods to effectively organise these discussions to achieve convergence. To give one example, see pragma-dialectics in Wikipedia. These methods are still under-utilised (this blog is a typical example).
As an example, let's look at the current discussion raised by Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick. If their interpretations are on shaky grounds, they could have easily been shot down in an open workspace, without any need of editorial decisions. In an open workspace, anyone could publish their statements (idea promoted by Bruce G Charlton) and all statements incoherent with facts would be invalidated (idea promoted by Ben Goldacre) by peers. There is no need to remove invalid statements, because they are shown to be invalid. On the contrary, it prevents from repeating invalid statements.
A paradigm shift to open scientific workspaces has at least two major problems. It is not clear how scientists could get merit from participating in mass collaboration instead of writing articles. In addition, this might cause problems to the business logic of scientific journals.
We have drafted a procedure description for a journal that is based on the ideas briefly described above: Opasnet Journal (http://en.opasnet.org/w/Opasnet_Journal).
- Mikko Pohjola
- Jouni Tuomisto
- environmental health scientists
- THL, Finland