Hot of the heels of the busted “Peer Review Ring” we have this from Nature News:
In April, the US National Academy of Sciences elected 105 new members to its ranks. Academy membership is one the most prestigious honours for a scientist, and it comes with a tangible perk: members can submit up to four papers per year to the body’s high-profile journal, the venerable Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), through the ‘contributed’ publication track. This unusual process allows authors to choose who will review their paper and how to respond to those reviewers’ comments.
For many academy members, this privileged path is central to the appeal of PNAS. But to some scientists, it gives the journal the appearance of an old boys’ club. “Sound anachronistic? It is,” wrote biochemist Steve Caplan of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, in a 2011 blogpost that suggested the contributed track could be used as a “dumping ground” for some papers. Editors at the journal have strived to dispel that perception.
…
Having control over the review process brings advantages. Those who work across disciplinary boundaries say that being able to choose your own reviewers is the best way to ensure that referees actually understand the material. “Chemists have no idea about glycobiology,” says Chi-Huey Wong of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who studies the chemistry and biology of sugars.
More here: http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-publishing-the-inside-track-1.15424
h/t to Tom Nelson
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Letter from 2012, still apparently relevant:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/08/an-incovenient-result-july-2012-not-a-record-breaker-according-to-the-new-noaancdc-national-climate-reference-network/#comment-1054285
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_July_2012.png
To:
Heads of Departments,
Proceedings, National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Dear PNAS Heads:
UAH Global Temperature Update for July 2012: +0.28C,
COOLER than June, 2012: +0.37 deg.
If one wants to argue about GLOBAL warming, should one not look first at GLOBAL temperatures?
Respectfully, Allan
I would agree with several posters that in the biosciences at least it is not so unusual to be invited to suggest your own reviewers. I proposed reviewers in this way for a paper I submitted recently in the osteoporosis field – it got rejected.
Well it would seem to me, that the NAS, being a National Institution, would simply have membership requirements that are documented just as are the US tax laws.
Then any person who can document compliance with those National standards, would automatically be eligible for membership, and requiring only submission of credentials, and a one time fee for review of those credentials.
And all matters submitted as advice to government, either POTUS or the Congress, would require also a minority (presumably dissenting ) report, as well as the “consensus” report.
Isaac Newton hated Robert Hooke. His most famous saying, “”If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” was a jibe at Hooke, who was a hunchback.
History has almost forgotten Hooke, Britain’s answer to Leonardo, not least because Newton outlived him and used his immense influence to bury Hooke’s legacy to science.
The major flaw in peer review is that scientists use it to bury work that competes with their own. Cliques of scientists bury the work of cliques of other scientists. Science itself is diminished by these practices.
Einstein regularly withdrew papers when reviewer insisted on changes because he believed he knew better than the reviewers. Yet he was not immune to detailed corrections, in particular corrections to errors in his mathematics, some of which went undetected for years.