Comments on: How it works

By: Lawi

Lawi — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:52:27 +0000

Maybe a similar system is applied in Lawi, with several approaches to digital peer-review.

By: Phillip Lord

Phillip Lord — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:31:14 +0000

Whether it would be okay or not, it is and does happen already. Within the science, obviously, this is a problem. I don’t think that the publication system can OR needs to stop this. To quote Feynman “reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” In the end, it is experiment, and repetition that will sort out truth from fiction.

The responsibility of the publication system, I think, is this; it needs to establish and maintain a clear record. With knowledgeblog, identities are open, reviews are open, changes are open. If people try and game the system, they can. But the evidence that they have done so will be clear to see, and it will remain for the future. Personally, I think that this is an advance from the current system.

By: Marshall Abrams

Marshall Abrams — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:18:32 +0000

Would it be OK if I and a few of my friends got together and just made up crazy results, and then reviewed each others’ work? Pick the right results, and they might echo repeatedly through blogs, both scientific and unscientific. Might even get noticed on cable news, discussed by pundits, and reported in mainstream news organizations. Heck, with the right strategy, we might even influence public policy. Cool!

By: Pedro Mendes

Pedro Mendes — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:22:04 +0000

Non-blind peer-review would increase the quality in the sense that no longer could reviewers write outrageous comments and block publication of papers out of obscure interests. Most reviewers are honest scientists that are doing their best for the good of science; unfortunately the cloak of anonymity allows a small but damaging number of reviewers to take dubious positions that damage publication of good work. Doing the peer review in the open stops this nonsense.

By: Phillip Lord

Phillip Lord — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:37:42 +0000

We don’t know whether it will or not, nor do I know any particular way of evaluating whether this has or has not happened. The knowledgeblog process supports different kinds of peer-review, not all of them being author-picked reviewers. But my feeling is that public peer-review increases quality; if the peer-review is poor than now the public will know this, which will reflect badly on the reviewer and the reviewee. In the end, this is likely to get reflected in the comments of the article — in the same way that you, for instance, have written this question.

My own experience of blind peer-review both as reviewer and reviewee is that it doesn’t introduce a huge amount of quality control anyway. The variance of scores that people give papers is pretty huge. And the helpfulness of reviews to the authoring process is similarly variable. My feeling is that this sort of quality control still reflects the limited page lengths of print journals. Quality should be judged post-hoc, after publication.

By: Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:58:47 +0000

I’m sure that this must have been mentioned at some point in earlier discussion, but how does non-blind (and author-picked!) review not lend itself to a dip in quality control??