Tapsearch Com EditorJournal Nature ends online peer review
December 25th 2006 20:01
This is one of the more disappointing stories of the Internet age: The journal Nature discontinued an online peer review process after scientists didn't use it enough.
A little background on how scientific journals work: Basically, researchers do experiments and submit write-ups of them. A board of editors -- or, in this case, the whole community -- goes through them and decides what is good enough to appear in print. After reading about the experiment, other scientists might want to replicate it, challenge the interpretation or do complementary research.
Journals are quite useful, then, in many fields. The main problem was that the "gatekeepers" who edited the journal had tons of power and could squelch controversial research. This experiment was supposed to fix that.
From the story:
"During Nature's trial, only 5 percent of 1,369 papers ranging from astronomy to neuroscience that were selected for traditional peer review were also posted on the Internet for open commentary. Of those, 33 papers received no comments. The rest received a total of 92 technical comments.
"The journal concluded that many researchers were either too busy or had no real incentive in evaluating their colleagues' work publicly. In addition, none of the editors found the posted comments influenced their decision whether a paper gets published.
"Nature, published by an arm of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., is highly selective of the research it publishes. Of the 10,000 papers it receives every year, the journal rejects about 60 percent outright. Only about 7 percent of submissions are published."
The situation is really sad -- an era where blogs like this one attract critical-minded readers, but scientists see no value in offering advice on their colleagues' work. I would almost argue that participating in this kind of experiment is the job of a researcher. Additional perspectives are always in the best interest of free debate and scientific advancement.
Perhaps what's needed is an incentive beyond a "thanks to so-and-so" line in the paper. The field of science greatly rewards publication ("publish or perish"), so maybe it needs to reward helping with others' publications as well.
Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com and http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.
A little background on how scientific journals work: Basically, researchers do experiments and submit write-ups of them. A board of editors -- or, in this case, the whole community -- goes through them and decides what is good enough to appear in print. After reading about the experiment, other scientists might want to replicate it, challenge the interpretation or do complementary research.
Journals are quite useful, then, in many fields. The main problem was that the "gatekeepers" who edited the journal had tons of power and could squelch controversial research. This experiment was supposed to fix that.
From the story:
"During Nature's trial, only 5 percent of 1,369 papers ranging from astronomy to neuroscience that were selected for traditional peer review were also posted on the Internet for open commentary. Of those, 33 papers received no comments. The rest received a total of 92 technical comments.
"The journal concluded that many researchers were either too busy or had no real incentive in evaluating their colleagues' work publicly. In addition, none of the editors found the posted comments influenced their decision whether a paper gets published.
"Nature, published by an arm of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., is highly selective of the research it publishes. Of the 10,000 papers it receives every year, the journal rejects about 60 percent outright. Only about 7 percent of submissions are published."
The situation is really sad -- an era where blogs like this one attract critical-minded readers, but scientists see no value in offering advice on their colleagues' work. I would almost argue that participating in this kind of experiment is the job of a researcher. Additional perspectives are always in the best interest of free debate and scientific advancement.
Perhaps what's needed is an incentive beyond a "thanks to so-and-so" line in the paper. The field of science greatly rewards publication ("publish or perish"), so maybe it needs to reward helping with others' publications as well.
Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com and http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.
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