Saturday, March 1, 2014

Failure of academic peer-review publishing system


http://cdn.elsevier.com/assets/image/0020/140267/Reviewing.jpgIts just keeps getting worse and worse every day.

Today I found out that there are have been numerous computer generated papers published by well respected publishers. The funniest part is that those manuscripts were (should have been) peer-reviewed prior to acceptance!

And there is an interesting comment about this issue here:
"I am an editor of an academic journal (one of the top ones in my field). We solve this (along with a few other problems) via machine based screening of papers in the first instance. More journals do this to catch out these problems."

This comment shows that failure to identify the actual problem. Algo-pre-screening is not gonna solve the problem of failing peer-review process. The whole point with this game, I presume, was shows the failure of peer-review process.

There is another article dooming peer-review process, where Professor Sydney Brenner, a professor of Genetic medicine at the University of Cambridge and Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 2002 says:
"But I don’t believe in peer review because I think it’s very distorted and as I’ve said, it’s simply a regression to the mean.I think peer review is hindering science.In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists." I couldn't agree more.

What this all means? A very simple thing - present peer-review system for academic publishing is wrong, we need a new one.

1 comment:

  1. I stumbled upon an interesting article, titled: "Shorter, better, faster, free: Blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is communicated"
    http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/12/28/shorter-better-faster-free/

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