end of peer review

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end of peer review

Post by Metacrock » Thu Feb 11, 2016 4:53 pm

decline of civilization is complete

http://www.euroscientist.com/the-day-wh ... ruly-open/
Innovation

The day when science is truly open

22 June, 2015 | Vanessa Schipani | 2 Comments


How will the web change the practice of science in the next 25 years?

Network peer-review via the web and enhanced data crunching power are two of the defining changes recently bestowed upon 21st century science. While the term Science 2.0, like Web 2.0, means different things to different people, many appeal to transparency as its defining characteristic. In fact, results of the European Commission’s public consultation on Science 2.0 published in May 2015 reveal that stakeholders voted to replace Science 2.0 with open science in any further proceedings of the Commission.

Yet, Science 2.0 holds in store many other new issues for researchers to confront, such as changes in the style and means of collaborating and obtaining funding. Sophisticated algorithms now allow scientists to produce and analyse data in new and faster ways. In addition, the web has opened up ways for citizens to interface with various stages of the scientific process–from funding to data production.

But the overarching question of whether the web will accelerate research and innovation in the next 25 years still remains to be answered. Nonetheness, Science 2.0, in its many connotations, has great potential to establish a more reliable scientific process, with greater transparency and accountability. And that alone is an exciting prospect.

A Call for Transparency

So how should the scientific process evolve towards greater transparency? Experts agree different disciplines must have different standards for openness.1 “There is no one-size-fits-all,” says Eva Méndez, an associate professor of library and information science at Carlos III University of Madrid in Spain, who was involved in the Commission’s Science 2.0 consultation. Today, calls for greater transparency have progressed more smoothly in fields like high-energy physics than in biomedicine because of the relatively extreme competition pervading the latter, adds Caroline Lynn Kamerlin, who is chair for Young Academy Europe (YAE)–a pan-European bottom-up initiative of a dynamic group of recognised European young scientists–and who also took part in the Commission’s consultation.


Read more: http://www.euroscientist.com/the-day-wh ... z3ztp0BMb7
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the decline is all the way down
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met
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Re: end of peer review

Post by met » Fri Feb 12, 2016 10:10 pm

As I am programming right now, i can relate. There's this modularity, this sense of abstractions built on abstractions on abstractions, and if one module doesn't fit, just plug in a different one.. friggin' broke my website by upgrading, and had to add a compatibility module, calling down the following file from a cloud somewhere ... "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/ ... migrate.js" .... Is science like that now, too? Is the thin layer of it that you actually understand so thin and so specialized to you, that you don't really have any peers anyway? And if one theory doesn't fit, just plug in another, or look around in the "clouds" for a compatibility module.....

If so, it's becoming a rather faceless project....
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
Dr Ward Blanton

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Re: end of peer review

Post by sgttomas » Fri Apr 08, 2016 11:59 pm

Peer review was broken, though. The File Drawer Problem, while not strictly about peer review per se, is still an aspect of that system of validation and recognition. And of course the anonymous nature of the peer review is also deeply flawed. Not to mention the very presentation of evidence through such a structure calls so much into question. ....if the work even sees peer review, that is.

You're right to question how problematic this 2.0 mumbo jumbo will be. There is a deeper question at heart, which is how complex ought we make our world such that we need to propose such incredibly sophisticated sophistry to appear to justify the risk, and falsify the perception of reward?

Peace,
-sgttomas
Prophet Muhammad (God send peace and blessings upon him) is reported to have said, "God says 'I am as My servant thinks I am' " ~ Sahih Al-Bukhari, Vol 9 #502 (Chapter 93, "Oneness of God")

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Re: end of peer review

Post by Metacrock » Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:40 pm

sgttomas wrote:Peer review was broken, though. The File Drawer Problem, while not strictly about peer review per se, is still an aspect of that system of validation and recognition. And of course the anonymous nature of the peer review is also deeply flawed. Not to mention the very presentation of evidence through such a structure calls so much into question. ....if the work even sees peer review, that is.

You're right to question how problematic this 2.0 mumbo jumbo will be. There is a deeper question at heart, which is how complex ought we make our world such that we need to propose such incredibly sophisticated sophistry to appear to justify the risk, and falsify the perception of reward?

Peace,
-sgttomas
Peer review is a must. blind submission is a mist otherwise there's not scholarly basis. But there are ways to cheat on blind submission
Have Theology, Will argue: wire Metacrock
Buy My book: The Trace of God: Warrant for belief

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Re: end of peer review

Post by sgttomas » Wed Apr 13, 2016 7:21 am

I'm just not that impressed with peer review. It's not relevant to producing knowledge in the short term and over the long term there may be better ways to conduct review.
A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling.

This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016 ... pockethits

...but maybe I have misunderstood you?

Peace,
-sgttomas
Prophet Muhammad (God send peace and blessings upon him) is reported to have said, "God says 'I am as My servant thinks I am' " ~ Sahih Al-Bukhari, Vol 9 #502 (Chapter 93, "Oneness of God")

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met
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Re: end of peer review

Post by met » Wed Apr 13, 2016 11:49 am

I've had some academic friends say they'd rather avoid peer review, since it delays publication so long, and since iit forces them to change their articles in ways that make them not even say what they actually were intended to say. And, some are wiling to pay quite a lot - like, $500 -$1000 - to "self-publish" an article instead - there's apparently an academically-respectable way to do that, now. That's all I know....
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
Dr Ward Blanton

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Re: end of peer review

Post by QuantumTroll » Fri May 06, 2016 4:52 am

Caveat: All this is true in my field, maybe not in all others...

Those "pay-to-publish, free-to-read" academic journals are, unfortunately, mostly trash. Some sort of filtering is necessary, because it is easy to do bad science and hard to do good science. When a journal takes money to publish something, then there is no incentive for them not to publish something.

While the ordinary peer-review process sometimes takes a long time and is fraught with error, usually it goes "quickly enough "and works "well enough". Just like evolution, the goal isn't perfection, it's being better than your competitors. When you work at a university that pays for the expensive journals, you tend to turn to those journals because you know the results are probably better than you can find elsewhere.

Science is, more than anything, a process of communication. If you're doing research that is so specialised that few people outside your immediate group understands what you're doing and there is no community from which to draw unbiased reviewers, then you're skirting the edge of what constitutes good science. Runology (the study of Nordic runes) is an example of such a field, which pains me because I have some friends who are active runologists.

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met
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Re: end of peer review

Post by met » Fri May 06, 2016 10:26 am

QT, notice that the criticism - in the articles posted here by both me and ST - draws quite a lot from medical research, a field where strongly interested parties (ie the pharmaceuticals ) directly or indirectly finance a lot of it, and hence provide researchers with even more incentive than personal bias and self-interest, to come up with positive results.

Admittedly, in fields where less $$$ is immediately at stake, corrupting influences might be somewhat toned down....
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
Dr Ward Blanton

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