[HN Gopher] Nature will publish peer review reports as a trial
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Nature will publish peer review reports as a trial
Author : aaavl2821
Score : 68 points
Date : 2020-02-05 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| yurlungur wrote:
| I wonder what is the impact of this change.
|
| From my limited experience peer reviews are treated as fairly
| private communications between the reviewers, editor and authors.
| We would often use it as an important clue on what to change even
| if we are going to another journal for publication. This makes
| the content of the reviews rather sensitive, especially in the
| cases where there is competition for publication on the same
| subject.
|
| There are also the cases where Reviewer X may ask authors to do a
| very specific analysis/improvement that may somewhat benefit
| their own future research. It's all par for the course.
|
| Another aspect of this that sometimes experienced professors have
| a fairly good sense on who's giving the review, even though they
| may be anonymous.
|
| Since this policy gives authors the choice of publishing reviews,
| I hope it does not degrade the quality of reviews and make people
| uncomfortable for writing "rude" feedback.
| scott_s wrote:
| I think this is good, and may also _improve_ reviews. I doubt
| that Nature has an issue with substandard reviews, but I have
| definitely seen it in some of the computer science conferences I
| submit to and have served on [1]. If reviewers know that their
| review may be published, I think they may turn in more
| substantial reviews.
|
| [1] In computer science, conference publications are peer-
| reviewed and highly competitive. We also have journals, but most
| novel work appears in conferences. The more theory oriented parts
| of computer science will tend to publish in journals more, but
| they still publish in conferences, too.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Published reviews will just make reviews political in new ways.
| As a graduate student, I helped my advisor review a paper
| submitted to Nature that was publishing a large biological data
| set. The internal metrics that the authors provided made it
| clear that the data was 95% noise. The review was direct and to
| the point. The paper was rightfully rejected, but ended up in
| another high profile journal after the authors removed the
| damning evidence. The corresponding author was one of the most
| famous and powerful people in a very large field. My advisor
| was still a relatively junior professor at the time, even if
| well known. I don't think publication of the review would have
| changed things for him, but for many others I have known, it
| might have.
| nextos wrote:
| Indeed. In my experience and other researchers I know, often
| rival groups will try to block your research from getting
| published in Nature or Science by asking for unreasonable
| follow-up experiments. It's sadly very political. Hopefully
| this will improve things.
|
| I personally know the current Nature chief editor and she
| totally agrees with my points above. In contrast, I have always
| found math & CS journal reviews way more fair _and_ rigorous.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _It 's sadly very political_
|
| This is the predictable consequence of pre publication review
| by competitors.
|
| The solution is not to hope for better reviewers. It's to
| abolish the failed peer review system.
| leereeves wrote:
| > It's to abolish the failed peer review system.
|
| And replace with...?
| jsmith45 wrote:
| In many ways the real peer review comes after
| publication, when more people have seen the work, and can
| react to it. In some fields it is not terribly rare for
| flaws in the work get discovered at that point, and
| rebuttals get written and circulated (or possibly even
| published in the journal.)
|
| The prepublication peer review is not always a terribly
| high bar to pass. It does help to weed out some of the
| crap, but lots still get published, especially in less
| competitive journals.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| The peer review process has reached a point where it's more
| harmful than helpful.
|
| What I want has following properties:
|
| * Version control, I can contribute to other people's papers
|
| * I can link to a sentence in another paper at some point in time
| so that when I read another paper, I can go to the location
| immediately
|
| * Open, like arxiv (anyone can publish anything), however arxiv
| discourages uploading personal or class projects, which is a
| terrible idea, the best part about GitHub is finding someone's
| abandoned project that does something
|
| * Full-text search
|
| I think that most academic publishing startups approach the
| problem by indexing already published papers. I think that
| starting clean slate is achievable.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| None of the points you raised are about peer review...
| Reedx wrote:
| It seems people are kneejerk downvoting you, but maybe it's
| true that peer review is a problem. It's worth questioning at
| least.
|
| Eric Weinstein (for one) has been talking about this a lot and
| makes the point that it could be better to work out errors in
| public, instead of defaulting to census.
|
| _" The need for verification from others dampens the potential
| for imagination, which Weinstein believes to be essential for
| stretching beyond what is currently known to dream the
| unknowable. This, he argues, is how the sciences actually
| evolve.
|
| Weinstein points to a 1963 Scientific American article by Paul
| Dirac in which the theoretical physicist discusses the
| discovery of a third dimension, itself a revolutionary idea
| proposed by Newton, and then to four dimensions, as provided by
| Einstein. Imagination is required to make further theoretical
| leaps, which might require not listening to present-day
| consensus.
|
| Weinstein notes that when Crick and Watson published their
| seminal 1953 paper on the double helix, Nature did not need
| peer review to allow its publication. "It was an editor's job
| to figure out if it was worthy of publication." Thankfully, the
| editors allowed it; that paper revolutionized our understanding
| of molecular biology. Their work is the basis of all genetic
| research today."_
|
| https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/eric-weinstein-sc...
| chr1 wrote:
| It's indeed strange to see the parent comment being
| downvoted. Especially by people who know what github is.
|
| Current academic journals are harmful for science, the same
| way as trying to use Roman numerals would be harmful for
| math. They are outdated means of communication that slows
| down progress.
|
| Science needs its github, and github could easily become that
| with very small effort.
| fooker wrote:
| You are underestimating the amount of domain knowledge needed
| for this. Try contributing to open source software which is
| currently used for research, you'll realize the issue.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| The domain knowledge being how academia works? My point is
| not to perfectly copy how academia works but to create a new
| platform that will allow people outside of academia to
| participate in the scientific process.
|
| Like maybe your skill is that you can fix up poorly written
| wording. This platform will allow you to specialize in one
| thing.
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