4 ms·

I completely agree that replication is essential, but am arguing that peer review and consensus based science do not help improve replication and thus do not pr

I completely agree that replication is essential, but am arguing that peer review and consensus based science do not help improve replication and thus do not produce better science (generally). We put huge amounts of (unpaid) scientific resources towards peer review and it has hardly improved anything. It’s the opposite: “it’s peer reviewed” has become a reflexive defence of published papers with the incorrect implicit assumption that peer review makes the science better. We should focus on the initiatives that have a proven track record of improving things (like open science) and abandon peer review and reliance on consensus. As you point out, financial limits prevent replication. So why do we spend so much time and money on fancy journals and reviewers who have such a terrible track record of improving things? We could be replicating instead. For a recent example of consensus failures, see Nobel Prize winner Katalin Karikó whos seminal paper was rejected by Nature and whos research programme was rejected by her University for being too incremental. Her peers failed because they relied on flawed heuristics like consensus.

wolverine876 3y ago
> We put huge amounts of (unpaid) scientific resources towards peer review and it has hardly improved anything. What was the alternative (and when?), and what were the results? Who will fund all this replication - basically double-funding all research? Do we want our scientists spending their limited time on old things instead of discovering new ones?
- brutusborn 3y ago
  I have more ideas in my other comments, but fundamentally I think open review is a better norm. Publish a preprint and let the world have at it! You don’t need a committee to decide who your ‘peers’ are: if they care enough they will be reading your paper anyway. Normalising publishing these reviews (like PubPeer) would ensure review, without an arbitrary choice of ‘peers’. Think a paper needs more reviews? Then pay the reviewers and publish their reviews. The benefits of secrecy and gate keeping are negligible compared to the downside. Currently billions are spent on academic publishing even though servers are cheap and the labour is unpaid. This would be a good starting point to fund replications. But that will never happen while the status quo is “peer reviewed = good science” Also, scientists should be spending time on what they think is valuable. Scientists happily replicate important papers using their existing resources. If no-one cares about your result and won't replicate for free, then pay someone to do it! This is the basis of adversarial collaborations (see FEP collaboration funded by a philanthropic foundation). No-one is advocating that e.g. we replicate newtons law for the Nth time. And how to determine if N is enough? Use Lakatos' MSRP to compare rival theories. Again, these dreams are predicated on the status quo changing to where scientists care about the content of a paper, not where is it published or that a faceless committee has accepted its foibles. A world where the public response to a non-replicated result is: "I wonder if any groups plan on replicating?" vs "New paper published in __nature__ has <newsworthy counter-intuitive yet unreplicable result>! Book deal / gov. contract / faculty promotion here I come!"

wolverine876 3y ago

> We put huge amounts of (unpaid) scientific resources towards peer review and it has hardly improved anything. What was the alternative (and when?), and what were the results? Who will fund all this replication - basically double-funding all research? Do we want our scientists spending their limited time on old things instead of discovering new ones?

brutusborn 3y ago
I have more ideas in my other comments, but fundamentally I think open review is a better norm. Publish a preprint and let the world have at it! You don’t need a committee to decide who your ‘peers’ are: if they care enough they will be reading your paper anyway. Normalising publishing these reviews (like PubPeer) would ensure review, without an arbitrary choice of ‘peers’. Think a paper needs more reviews? Then pay the reviewers and publish their reviews. The benefits of secrecy and gate keeping are negligible compared to the downside. Currently billions are spent on academic publishing even though servers are cheap and the labour is unpaid. This would be a good starting point to fund replications. But that will never happen while the status quo is “peer reviewed = good science” Also, scientists should be spending time on what they think is valuable. Scientists happily replicate important papers using their existing resources. If no-one cares about your result and won't replicate for free, then pay someone to do it! This is the basis of adversarial collaborations (see FEP collaboration funded by a philanthropic foundation). No-one is advocating that e.g. we replicate newtons law for the Nth time. And how to determine if N is enough? Use Lakatos' MSRP to compare rival theories. Again, these dreams are predicated on the status quo changing to where scientists care about the content of a paper, not where is it published or that a faceless committee has accepted its foibles. A world where the public response to a non-replicated result is: "I wonder if any groups plan on replicating?" vs "New paper published in __nature__ has <newsworthy counter-intuitive yet unreplicable result>! Book deal / gov. contract / faculty promotion here I come!"