Hans,

compose the criticism beforehand, then paste it into the comment space.

?

Louis

They start by absolving themselves of responsibility to detect fraud due to having only voluntary staff and reviewers, and go on to state: ” other groups seem to agree that the primary responsibility for determining whether a paper ought to be shelved in fiction or non-fiction should not rest with journals. This opinion is based partly on the patchy staffing and funding of most journals, which are volunteer-run society publications.[Howecer, Nature itself is published by the Nature Publishing Group.] “Journals don’t have the resources or the expertise,” says Mary Scheetz, director of extramural research at the Maryland-based Office of Research Integrity, which investigates ethical violations in work funded by the US National Institutes of Health”.

The scientific journals seem to want to improve the chances of detecting fraud, commenting that “in the past few years, journal editors have been taking a more proactive approach to dealing with fraud, and exploring what they can do with the resources they have”.

They give an example: “Stephen Evans, a statistician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, occasionally analyses papers in which the raw data are suspect. Tricks include looking for ‘digit preference’, the tendency of humans to round towards 0s and 5s, or the amount of variance in the data. “It is very difficult to invent data that has the right variability,” says Evans. But he agrees that the time and expense make checking every study “totally impractical”".

In a spot of good news, they go on to say that “journals are also starting to request that researchers carry out their own checks before even submitting a paper. Nature now advises authors to include independent verification for certain cloning papers, for example. And the Journal of the American Medical Association requires that industry-funded trials go through independent data analysis” [!].

The report winds up on a somewhat mornful note “Ultimately, if a journal does uncover evidence of fraud, it has to rely on the researchers’ institution or funding agency to investigate fully. But this depends on such bodies having the will and authority to do so. When the British Medical Journal tried to get someone to investigate the work of cardiologist Ram Singh of Haldberg Hospital and Research Institute in Moradabad, India, for example, no institution or scientific body could be persuaded to make a judgment on the case. Singh went on to publish similar work in The Lancet. In the end, both journals published expressions of concern, but did not feel able to retract the papers. And in an ongoing case involving RNA researcher Kazunari Taira, the University of Tokyo seems unlikely to get to the bottom of whether suspicious data were faked, because it does not have the authority to make a full inquiry”.

Their concluding paragraph is reminiscent of the exchanges Steve has had with the NSF (although it’s hard to see the NSF is really powerless in this regard).

I guess that folks at Nature have also not paid attention to the many postings here on archiving the data, which would also go a long way to address real fraud.

Special Report
Should journals police scientific fraud?
Emma Marris
Nature 439, 520-521 (2 February 2006) | doi:10.1038/439520a

RC’s efforts to prevent any links to climateaudit.org can lead to farcical situations, such as that at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=199 :
To their credit, RC had finally gotten around to mentioning von Storch’s and Huyber’s published comments on M&M. On that RC page, they provided free links to vS and H’s comments, but no links to M&M’s replies, although they at least mentioned that the replies existed! When queried about this (comment #1), Gavin posted links to *subscription-only* versions of the M&M replies, ensuring that most would be unable to access them, and claimed he couldn’t find any non-subscription links. Michael Mayson then posted a comment pointing out that the replies were freely available to all at climateaudit.org, and the RC moderators even commented on it. Shortly thereafter, a higher authority at RC then decided that either (a) perhaps M&M’s replies were too good for public consumption or (b) that having posted links to climateaudit.org just wouldn’t do, and deleted Mayson’s posted comment and the RC reply! (See comment #23 here: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=419) The later ruckus about RC adhering to its own posting policy shamed them into allowing my much later repost of the links to the climateaudit.org M&M replies.

Similarly to TCO’s experiences, my questions about why postings don’t appear have been ignored. As for “I wonder if what you calling censorship is just things falling through the cracks…”, I don’t consider my posts as censored until 3 business days have passed, and many other posts & moderators’ replies have appeared.

Hans is spot-on in post #91 about the effect this has on serious discussion at RC: why bother investing serious time and thought in a comment when chances are high it either won’t appear or will be ignored if the RC moderators can’t quickly dismiss it without spending much time on it? The RC staff seem most comfortable with a lecture-type model where they impart wisdom as set-piece presentations and avoid engaging very deeply with the readers.

To your question, yes I have asked about blocked posts a few times. My experience: they don’t respond to such inquiries.

I have definitely felt the hand of censorship at RC. Several posts were blocked. If you doubt me, read back over this site. There are several (not all) that I posted over here to have a copy of them. It happened often enough and others posts were being allowed that I can tell the pattern was unfair.

As you say, I’ve had plenty of opportunity and time posting over there. I can tell that contrary posts tend to be censored. I have had some get on. More openness than usual recently. I think the victories that the stick-breakers are winning in the hard-core science journals is having an effect. I also think that spending time on both sites, it’s pretty obvious that while neither is perfect, Steve is much more interested in explaining to ground truth his math. When it’s confusing, it’s just because of the level or occasionally his style. But he will engage on critical comments. Gavin et al on the other side, instead really hate to get into the guts of technical discussion and when they do tend to be dismissive/obfuscatory/faux authoritative vice really hashing things over in a Richard Feymannlike method.

This site is incredible, with about 4 Ph.D. theses of 3/4 completed analyses that are shrewd in problem selection and sophisticated in math. I think even the stickers can tell that Steve can bring it on the stats/methods discussions. That’s why you are seeing people like Rasmus and the like run to a “statistics* doesn’t matter” retort.

* i.e. the mathematical description of sginficance of data observed)

The frustrating thing in realclimate is, that you never know if a critical comment gets posted. This is heavily discouraging critics: would you spend 15 minutes on a posting, knowing that it disappears into nothing?

I see no fewer then 40+ post by you two at RealClimate. I see the post from Armand that was supposedly censored and could not for the life of me figure why they would have censored it. Have you asked them specifically why they censored any of your “innocuous” post? I notice the post are reviewed before posting. Mine from yesterday took 6 hours before it was posted. I wonder if what you calling censorship is just things falling through the cracks because most of the exchanges seem to be one sided in favor of the RealClimate people. I would think they’d invite the fodder.