cousin_it comments on The Journal of (Failed) Replication Studies - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Vladimir_Gritsenko 23 August 2009 09:15AM

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Comment author: Christian_Szegedy 24 August 2009 02:49:22AM *  2 points [-]

The current system of scientific publishing is clearly outdated.

There are issues with the biases, but also with for-profit nature of the system that charges huge sums of money for accessing the work of researchers funded by public grants and reviewed by researchers for free, financed by public money.

Then add to this all those phony journals, that are theoretically peer reviewed, but have very low (or non-existent) standards and accept everything to make money or simply exist because some big-pharma company uses them to publish skewed tests to get FDA approvals, etc.

I think one or two additional special-purpose journals would not really change the landscape.

IMO, what we need is a complete modern infrastructure based on state of the art IT/social networking. One that allows the review of articles even after they officially appeared with an elaborate voting system that factors in the credibility of the reviewers, It should make it possible to add (publish) refutations and the publication of positive or negative attempts of replications, etc and organize the articles with their support/refutations/endorsements in an easily accessible database.

Ideally, such a system could work both as a rating and publication medium, but with the current scientific publishing lobby, it would not have much chance to take off. The only chance is to do this by extending an existing meta-system (e.g. citeseer) with a general discussion/rating/publishing forum, that would allow the publication of critics/refusals/extensions of existing papers maybe even in a peer-reviewed manner.

In the field that I work, I see that the scientific community discusses and generally supports such changes and given all the efforts and progress of the last decade I'd be surprised if we won't see such (or similar) one or more systems emerging in the next 10 years.

Comment author: cousin_it 24 August 2009 09:48:45AM *  0 points [-]

I think one or two additional special-purpose journals would not really change the landscape. IMO, what we need is a complete modern infrastructure based on state of the art IT/social networking.

You may be right, but beware of throwing cold water on Vladimir's idea. It might just work. After all, arXiv is a simple website without bells and whistles, and look how much impact it had.