“An interesting story came to light this week when a student tried to replicate the results in a paper. He found that he wasn’t able to. I wrote something before about the fundamental principle of the scientific method – that the results of an experiment should be capable of replication and verification by others …” (more)
[The World According to Gar, 21 April]
“The traditional peer-review process is not a 100% reliable filter, argues journal editor Rolf Zwaan. It is foolish to view the published result as the only thing that counts simply because it was published …” (more)
[Impact of Social Sciences, 19 April]
“The rapid change in science communication is leading to multithreaded discussions on peer review (just one example of many, Philip Moriarty’s recent posting at the IOP) and models for journals …” (more)
[Ferniglab's Blog, 14 April]
“Do papers reporting uninteresting null results or confirmational results need to go through the same peer review process as papers reporting significant and novel results? …” (more)
[Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 20 March]
“Yesterday, Thursday the 14th of March 2014, I had the great pleasure of speaking at the University of Sussex to an entirely mixed audience of humanists, scientists, librarians, OA enthusiasts and OA sceptics …” (more)
[Martin Paul Eve, 15 March]
“We throw around the term ‘peer review’, but like so many terms, it’s often used without fully understanding what it signifies …” (more)
[Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 18 February]
“Researchers waiting for their manuscript to emerge from multiple rounds of peer review as it bounces from journal to journal can easily get frustrated at the inefficiencies of the system …” (more)
[Richard Van Noorden, Nature News & Comment, 12 February]
“… It’s still unclear what motivated the hack, which others are referring to as ‘editorial spoofing’. While we don’t like to speculate, we’ve gathered some clues that point in a certain direction: The hacker doesn’t seem to have been working on behalf of the authors submitting manuscripts, but instead may have been trying to gain more citations for particular papers …” (more)
[Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch, 18 December]
“… Now, Retraction Watch has learned that the Elsevier Editorial System (EES) was hacked sometime last month, leading to faked peer reviews and retractions — although the submitting authors don’t seem to have been at fault. As of now, eleven papers by authors in China, India, Iran, and Turkey have been retracted from three journals …” (more)
[Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch, 11 December]
“For generations of scientists, ‘peer review’ has been the cornerstone in advancing science and securing healthy scientific development. It is what distinguishes a scientific publication from any other publication and is the foundation of citation- and bibliometrics-based quality systems …” (more)
[Lena Adamson and Anders Flodström, University World News, 11 November]
“In recent times post-publication peer review (P3R) has come to mean many different things. If traditional peer-review represents a ‘filter then publish’ approach, P3R comes in two flavours …” (more)
[Michelle Dalton, libfocus, 26 October]
“Juries and peer-review emanate from a common wellspring — the notion that peer judgment can help validate arguments, sharpen judgment, and triage information …” (more)
[Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 9 October]
“… If I publish a book, I get royalties. If I publish an opinion piece in the newspaper, I get a couple of hundred dollars. Once a magazine paid me $5,000 for an article. But I get paid nothing directly for the most difficult, time-consuming writing I do: peer-reviewed academic articles …” (more)
[Hugh Gusterson, Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 September]
“Standard lore has it that scientific results are supposed to be published in academic journals before they are even worth discussing. These publications use a ‘peer-review’ system to determine the validity of a paper …” (more)
[Andrew Pontzen, Big Wide World, 21 June]
“Existing norms for scientific communication are rooted in anachronistic practices of bygone eras, making them needlessly inefficient. We outline a path that moves away from the existing model of scientific communication to improve the efficiency in meeting the purpose of public science – knowledge accumulation. We call for six changes …” (more)
[Gerry McKiernan, Scholarship 2.0, 2 June]
“Peer-reviewed publications and scientific conference reports can expect explicit protection as England revises its libel laws, newly published legislation reveals. Libel law in the country has been a concern to scientists for some time …” (more)
[Daniel Cressey, Nature News Blog, 11 May]
“Discussions of the peer review system generally agree that it is imperfect, even significantly flawed, but that there are no viable alternatives. Recently, the debate has shifted to the ‘racket’ that is academic publishing: how commercial publishers are getting fat on the unpaid labour of researchers only to sell, at exorbitant cost, the product back to the author – not to mention reserving all copyright …” (more)
[Srila Roy, Times Higher Education, 26 April]
“This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu — a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other …” (more)
[Scholarship 2.0, 29 April]
“Academic research involving social media is still perceived as less rigorous than traditional journal publishing. Alan Cann argues that while peer review remains the gold standard for quality research, we must apply this standard to the new unit of publication – a blog or even a tweet, not look down on the digital methods entirely …” (more)
[Impact of Social Sciences, 16 April]
“Probably the most important scientific discovery of the 20th century – James D Watson and Francis Crick’s description of the double-helix structure of DNA – was not peer reviewed before it was published in Nature in 1953 …” (more)
[Curt Rice, University World News, 15 April]
