Comments on: Nature on Press Releases

By: Hwang and the May 2005 Nature Editorial « Climate Audit

Hwang and the May 2005 Nature Editorial « Climate Audit — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 18:07:44 +0000

[...] May 2005, I mentioned Hwang et al. [Science 2005], now at the center of a firestorm. This reference was entirely by [...]

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By: TCO

TCO — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:34:09 +0000

This has long been an issue (PG is right). Something that happens and something that journals complain about (with some justification). I did HTSC work in 1988 and it was readily planned that if we discovered something, we would do a press release (ahead of even writing a paper). And yes, sometimes, these things are wrong. At the same lab where I was, someone did a bad press release on O18 isotope effects on HTSC that got lots of pub and then was found out to be flawed. Still…if you discover a new element are you really going to keep it quiet until it comes out in a journal. Be real.

Another big problem is people who publish letters and then never publish full papers. Applied Marketing Letters…oops I mean Applied Physics Letters is one of the worst examples.

By: Max

Max — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 15:56:12 +0000

Again a prejudice against Industry, by implying that business is secrety stagging information that could be of value to the public. Never should you forget that behind public funding, there is the same agenda, however, there is no control over a government and its spending policy…
Guess, they believe government is some miracelous good thing, while all major businesses are thieving bast****.

By: Roger Bell

Roger Bell — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 18:55:33 +0000

Louis,
Internet review, as described in your message #8, seems to simply be the present system with the postal system being replaced by the internet.

By: Louis Hissink

Louis Hissink — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 06:32:51 +0000

Roger,

If one wanted a paper published on say XYZ journal, XYZ journal might post it on a limited access url, and reviewers could comment on the proposed paper via the internet, comments not being publicly available except to the authors, etc. If the redraft etc is ok, ie reviewers are happy with it, then it should be published, everything else being equal.

Whether this would be an improvement or otherwise is another matter, of course, and if the majority feel the present system is ok, then sure, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

My speculative thought may well be, in a practical sense, be unworkable.

By: Roger Bell

Roger Bell — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 18:52:48 +0000

Louis,
What do you mean by internet peer review? I don’t have complaints about the present system.

By: Louis Hissink

Louis Hissink — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 11:39:21 +0000

Roger,

that raises the issue of “internet” peer review, but who would police/edit such systems? As we have discovered, censorship is as much a problem in this domain, as in the pre-publication of the printed journals.

Frankly I can’t see an immediate solution to the problem though publication via transparent media, vis the internent, with perhaps fora to peer review the paper, publicly restricted for practical reasons to the “credentialled” might be one way.

A pit of vipers we seem to have invented to wander through to reach scientific ends.

By: Roger Bell

Roger Bell — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 02:08:39 +0000

I’ve got mixed feelings about this, partly because Nature is involved. I think they went contrary to good scientific practice in the whole MBH98 vs M&M episode – the subject was so important that M&M should have had a rejoinder printed . (Science has dirty hands as well, after Oreskes.)
I quite agree that it was wrong of the Newcastle authors to have any sort of press briefing before the paper was accepted by the journal. However, knowledge that such a paper had been written might well have been useful to other people, who could then have asked the authors for a copy. In my field there is a lot of sharing of preprints.
I agree with some of Peter Hartley’s comments about refereeing for journals – a lot depends upon the ability of the editor(s) to pick appropriate referees. It’s even more important for granting agencies to get competent referees.

By: Peter Hartley

Peter Hartley — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 15:43:36 +0000

“The paper could, in principle, be revised or even rejected after peer review, in which case the public would have been misinformed.” This puts far too much faith in peer review. As any honest academic will tell you, the journals are full of papers that either should not have been published at all, or at least should only have been published with extensive revision (the MBH paper under discussion on much of this web site being just one example). There are also many documented examples of papers that later became justly famous having been rejected by a number of journals before they ultimately were published. The fact is that academia is full of “clubs” of people who are buddies who meet regularly at conferences and referee each other’s papers. It is very difficult for genuinely novel papers to break through this “consensus view” of the “annointed few” in control of an area of study at any one time. Most papers need to be cast as a “twiddle” on the existing paradigm to be accepted for publciation. Fortnuately, there are many outlets for scholarship (including, today, web sites…) and, in so far as science is concerned, I am confident that theory that does not conform with the evidence will ultimately be discarded no matter how fervently it is believed by its proponents.