3 ms·

Open and public next-generation peer review

1 points by jmnicholson 12y ago

dalke 12y ago
Could someone explain why a journal would say "XXX does NOT publish papers that rely only on existing published data. In other words XXX does NOT publish papers that correct, [etc.] We only publish papers with original experimental data." Where are comments and corrections supposed to be published? For example, in my own field I read a paper a couple of years ago which didn't cite previous work (apparently blog posts on the topic, and implementations in two widely used free software packages don't count as previous work, because it's not really "academic"). It also incorporated data from the literature, and commented that a few of them were in error. I tracked them down and found that several were due to typos on their part. They also didn't cite all of their sources. This is not serious. At worst it's mediocre scholarship. The conclusions weren't wrong, and in fact agreed with the previous blog posts. This is the sort of correction that would go in a letter to the editor section. Only the publication doesn't have a letter to the editor section; only full papers, which must meet the normal criteria, and have an open access fee of about $1,000. Which is silly for something that's at most a page long. Some journal do have comments on their pages. My experience is that no one reads them, the URLs are not stable, and they are not indexed by journal search engines. I agree with the author - journals which don't allow corrections aren't following the scientific method. BTW, in looking through the older literature, one of my favorite papers starts: > This is a research report. None of this research was performed by the author, and nothing reported in this paper is new. It is the product of [many people]. ... This paper is an attempt to cumulate in one document some principles of information system design and planning. - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/c160012a004 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/c160012a004

1 points by jmnicholson 12y ago

dalke 12y ago

Could someone explain why a journal would say "XXX does NOT publish papers that rely only on existing published data. In other words XXX does NOT publish papers that correct, [etc.] We only publish papers with original experimental data." Where are comments and corrections supposed to be published? For example, in my own field I read a paper a couple of years ago which didn't cite previous work (apparently blog posts on the topic, and implementations in two widely used free software packages don't count as previous work, because it's not really "academic"). It also incorporated data from the literature, and commented that a few of them were in error. I tracked them down and found that several were due to typos on their part. They also didn't cite all of their sources. This is not serious. At worst it's mediocre scholarship. The conclusions weren't wrong, and in fact agreed with the previous blog posts. This is the sort of correction that would go in a letter to the editor section. Only the publication doesn't have a letter to the editor section; only full papers, which must meet the normal criteria, and have an open access fee of about $1,000. Which is silly for something that's at most a page long. Some journal do have comments on their pages. My experience is that no one reads them, the URLs are not stable, and they are not indexed by journal search engines. I agree with the author - journals which don't allow corrections aren't following the scientific method. BTW, in looking through the older literature, one of my favorite papers starts: > This is a research report. None of this research was performed by the author, and nothing reported in this paper is new. It is the product of [many people]. ... This paper is an attempt to cumulate in one document some principles of information system design and planning. - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/c160012a004 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/c160012a004