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The initial examples the author uses really do reflect the magnitude of the third problem. All of them were big breakthrough results in their fields - and hence
by kelnage 9y ago
The initial examples the author uses really do reflect the magnitude of the third problem. All of them were big breakthrough results in their fields - and hence people cared enough to do proper reviews - especially in the latter two cases. As an academic, I have participated in reviews of papers that I would have never otherwise read, but could still contribute to the process. Without something pushing all academics to participate in the system, then a more open solution risks moving science even closer to “only interesting problems/solutions/results get published”.
- aldoushuxley001 9y ago"Only interesting problems/solutions/results get published" I'm afraid we're already there. Journals are very much strongly incentivized to publish only interesting or novel results.
- kelnage 9y agoI agree there is definitely a bias towards such results - but I fear that completely free-for-all open access reviewing will make the effect even greater.
- improbable22 9y agoIsn't this the point of journals? They communicate new knowledge, which changes the status of what is known. There's a balance to be struck in how certain these things should be before being published, for sure. The p-hacking plague is a symptom of setting this certainty bar too low, or equivalently, the required level of novelty too high. Things which stay constant are the job of standards bodies, and textbook writers... these are important too, but different.
- squiggleblaz 9y agoI don't think so. If you work in a hard science like medicine or psychology, where problems are still so hard we can't produce clear answers as to results of a paper, we shouldn't really be trusting papers until they've been reproduced by some unrelated team. But if these results don't contradict the previous papers, they're not really communicating new knowledge. Sometimes this isn't a big deal (medicine is as far as I know regulated enough that reproduction is a part of the problem), but most science is characterised by not enough money distributed without caring about scientific outcomes. So we do have a problem at the moment. A team who does important but thankless scientific work can't get published. Too much science is just first draft status. And the only way to determine that is that people keep trying and trying to build on it and eventually decades later the tower of cards collapses when clever new PhD students start down new research avenues.
- gowld 9y agohttp://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr http://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr