Hi denizens, Now that Biology has gone missing, at least in the programs of the funding agencies in this part of the world, the reflections that I'm going to expose concern at best that even smaller field of natural philosophy that we euphemistically call, not without a twist of candour, "biomedicine". At worst, they only concern the world whose limits are the limits of my language.
As I understand it, the main purpose of really existing peer-reviewing is to act as a filter. By selecting those papers deemed publishable it spares us the herculean task of reading every possible piece emanating from our overheated brains. This actually reveals a big problem of really existing research (with the caveat expressed in the first paragraph). But I'm not going to venture into that problem: more clever minds have drowned in its muddy waters. Back to the point, if the need of publishing were not such a strong source of inspiration and we researchers would feel the compelling necessity of publishing only when we could write well-structured and thoughtful papers, full of useful data and rich in new ideas and hypotheses, we could then read a reasonable percentage of the papers concerning our fields of interest. In that utopia, peer-reviewing could be a continuous, transparent and open process that would involve a relevant part of the community. Not likely to happen and probably for good: knowledge seems to progress by a combination of slow accretion of small steps and sudden (re)interpretations of those steps. But what is interesting to see in that utopian/dystopian possibility is that really existing peer-reviewing suffers from a fundamental problem: statistical significance. Because, what significance is to be deposited in the opinions, whether reasonably argued or not (another thorny Pandora box I won't dare to open), of two, three or at best four people acting as editors or reviewers? Anonymous people in the latter case, to complete the scene. In the tension between these requirements trust is suppose to build up and give us a reasonable path to pursue our noble endeavours. In my insignificant opinion, in the current state of matters, trust is seriously broken. Too much pressure to publish, too many journals, too much money to make from publishing, too restricted and opaque a peer-reviewing system... As a corollary, my impression is that while many of us suspect we live in a bubble, we all seem to tacitly expect that we will not see it explode. A good friend of mine once offered me a book about the Spanish Armada; no joke. Its title was "The confident hope of a miracle". To rebuild trust we need, among other things, to rebuild our tools. And we better do it before the next big bang. Research is not the only human activity involving knowledge and its transmission, we could use some curiosity beyond our noses. Vale. Miguel Ortiz Lombardía Architecture et Fonction des Macromolécules Biologiques (UMR7257) CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université Case 932, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France Tel: +33(0) 491 82 86 44 Fax: +33(0) 491 26 67 20 mailto:miguel.ortiz-lombar...@afmb.univ-mrs.fr http://www.afmb.univ-mrs.fr/Miguel-Ortiz-Lombardia El 09/10/13 20:04, Navdeep Sidhu escribió: > John Bohannon wrote about his experience writing "a computer program to > generate hundreds of unique papers." Thought some of you might find it of > interest: > > John Bohannon. Who's Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342 (Oct. 4, 2013) 60-65. > DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60 > http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full > > Best regards, > Navdeep > > --- > Navdeep Sidhu > University of Goettingen > --- >
