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The Rise of Peer Review Bots
- cosmodisk 7y agoIf the scientist isn't revealing the name of the magazine,the whole announcement is useless.
- krastanov 7y agoOr maybe they want to focus on a systemic problem, and it is counterproductive to call out just one of the many entities that perpetuate it (opening the scientist to "sour grapes" type of attacks).
- drongoking 7y agoThe author compares it to YouTube but I don't think it's quite that bad. I doubt we'll see the relentless adapt-and-attack cycle that YouTube gets. The goal of researchers has always been to publish, but not every venue is equally reputable and the community knows that. Researchers who publish lots of weak papers in crappy journals get a reputation. Tenure committees know how to judge a publication list. As for bots, journals need to allow authors to respond to bots' rejections and have the rebuttal go to a human editor. True plagiarists won't bother, but if a bot is just catching superficial content this should be easy for an author to point out. Once editors get tired of dealing with false positives, the bots should get fixed. (As for p-values, that's a larger issue that's been discussed for a long time.)