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These complaints are just nonsense propagated by people who don't understand the academic process. As a researcher, I don't need to wait for a paper to be publi
by coliveira 11y ago
These complaints are just nonsense propagated by people who don't understand the academic process. As a researcher, I don't need to wait for a paper to be published in a journal to have access to its contents. Most respectable research is already publicized in targeted conferences and stored in websites such as arxiv.org and similar. That's exactly why researchers go to conferences every few months, in order to learn about the new developments before it appears on archived journals.
The reason why we still have journals is that they work as a recording of past research that has been peer reviewed by a well known group of experts (the editorial board). In fact, with the Internet pretty much any journal will have a list of accepted papers so you can access them before they are formally "published". So you can read these papers as soon as they receive the OK from the editorial board.
- rgejman 11y agoIn the biomedical sciences most publications DO NOT end up on preprint servers before being peer-reviewed and accepted. Therefore most stories are "done" a year or more before they are published anywhere. Sometimes they are presented at conferences, but often only once the paper is in submission.
- coliveira 11y agoEach technical field decides the best way to handle new research. If what you said is true, this is a matter particular to this and similar fields. However, many articles such as the one linked above make it believe that Science as a whole has a big problem because of peer reviewing standards, which is NOT true. In fact, most fields already have procedures to disseminate and archive results in a way that does not conflict with traditional peer reviewing.
- rgejman 11y agoThat's fair, but she's writing an editorial in FASEB, which is the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology journal :).
- et2o 11y agoDo you really think this reviewer for FASEB, an HHMI Investigator and a tenured professor at Rockefeller University, doesn't "understand the academic process?" For better or for worse, biology isn't like computer science. Wet lab experiments take orders of magnitude more time, interpretation of results is often pretty complex, and there are a lot more articles published, which together combine to make this situation a little different. There have been several moves to establish ArXiv-like compendia for biology, but they haven't really caught on yet. I'm not sure exactly why.
- coliveira 11y agoThis only proves that this person is working in a particular dysfunctional field, among thousands of other scientific fields that have no problem with the process. There is probably no research area more competitive than astrophysics. The guys working there, however, decided to use arxiv.org to make available research that costs them millions of dollars and several years of work to produce. I don't see why the biological science community couldn't agree on something similar. It is a social problem, not a process or technological problem.
- untilHellbanned 11y agoYes, its a social problem. The reason is because for biomedical sciences there are many more tangible levels of success - personal, professional, financial, commercial — to be had. Nobody is gonna win in astrophysics like they can win in the biomedical sciences. Therefore what you end up with is much more of a hairball, mutually assured destruction scenario.
- et2o 11y agoIdk how you could quantify that astrophysics is more competitive than biology. There is a lot more money and also many more investigators in biomedicine. NIH grant funding is insanely competitive. Anyway, you are responding to an argument that I didn't originally make.