'Overstepping Your Authority' With Online Comments?
21/05/10 12:50 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Mon, 05/24/2010 - 14:17.
The anonymous peer-review process is designed to permit the detection of serious errors in data presentation and interpretation. However, in my experience, there are large variations in the quality of peer reviews from even top tier journals. Moreover, with the sheer proliferation of scientific journals that exists today, this filter is far less effective than desirable.
For junior faculty without tenure protection, being openly critical about dubious research conclusions could be risky. Likewise, for researchers that are highly dependent on grant funding that is peer-reviewed, there could be negative repercussions from reviewers that feel threatened by applicants. Nevertheless, it does not serve the scientific community if researchers refrain from an active dialogue in search of the truth. This is what sets "science" apart from religion, i.e. it is self-correcting. Researchers have to be critical of problematic research results, albeit with some diplomacy. Otherwise, much wasted time and resources will be diverted in unproductive directions. When this happens with new investigators, this can be particularly destructive.
At Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, we will soon be launching our own e-journal called Kinetica Online for publishing initially only our own scientific findings. We have elected to go this route to reduce our costs, shorten the time to publication, and make the information freely available over the Internet. Our intent is to have peer-review in which the reviewers are identified with the publication. We hope that this will encourage higher quality reviews. In addition, we will invite the scientific community to provided feed-back by the way of inclusion of their comments at the end of the articles to promote open dialogue. It should be an interesting experiment!
Link to the original blog post
The anonymous peer-review process is designed to permit the detection of serious errors in data presentation and interpretation. However, in my experience, there are large variations in the quality of peer reviews from even top tier journals. Moreover, with the sheer proliferation of scientific journals that exists today, this filter is far less effective than desirable.
For junior faculty without tenure protection, being openly critical about dubious research conclusions could be risky. Likewise, for researchers that are highly dependent on grant funding that is peer-reviewed, there could be negative repercussions from reviewers that feel threatened by applicants. Nevertheless, it does not serve the scientific community if researchers refrain from an active dialogue in search of the truth. This is what sets "science" apart from religion, i.e. it is self-correcting. Researchers have to be critical of problematic research results, albeit with some diplomacy. Otherwise, much wasted time and resources will be diverted in unproductive directions. When this happens with new investigators, this can be particularly destructive.
At Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, we will soon be launching our own e-journal called Kinetica Online for publishing initially only our own scientific findings. We have elected to go this route to reduce our costs, shorten the time to publication, and make the information freely available over the Internet. Our intent is to have peer-review in which the reviewers are identified with the publication. We hope that this will encourage higher quality reviews. In addition, we will invite the scientific community to provided feed-back by the way of inclusion of their comments at the end of the articles to promote open dialogue. It should be an interesting experiment!
Link to the original blog post