From a Wash Post article on evidence humans were in N. America earlier than previously thought. I myself have a mixed-feelings middle-ground view on peer review, but I'm in a very different field.
"The peer-review process is designed to help validate scientific claims, but Lowery argues that in archaeology it often leads to a circle-the-wagon mentality, allowing scientists to wave away evidence that doesn’t support the dominant paradigm. He says he isn’t seeking formal publishing routes because “life’s too short,” comparing this aspect of academic science to “the dumbest game I’ve ever played.”"
measured within reviewer uncertainty (~ 1/ confidence) in journal paper reviews
predictions of greater reviewer uncertainty: gender, if the paper was a protocol
NOT predictive: reviewer experience, time taken on review, reviewer nationality, paper version (first submission vs revision), paper length, readability
I once peer-reviewed a journal paper and asked for minor revisions, only to find that they had printed the manuscript completely unchanged except for the title. When I told the editors that they had wasted my time, they explained that this author, a woman of about 40, was extremely scary and would get super angry if they made any demands on her.
Reviewer Expertise (self-assessment): No familiarity
Reviewer Comments: *has a strong opinion on how our research should be framed and designed and why it is not novel and obsolete.
Reviewer verdict: Reject.
Does this type of god complex come with the PhD or is it a separate curriculum?
Aspiring to greater intellectual humility in science
Rink Hoekstra & Simine Vazire, 2021
"We provide a set of recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles and highlight the central role peer reviewers can play in incentivizing authors to foreground the flaws and uncertainty in their work, thus enabling full and transparent evaluation of the validity of research."
"When reviewers push for authors to own their limitations, this is not only good for science but may even be in line with (some) authors’ ideals. Of course, reviewers can also use positive comments to reshape incentives; that is, when authors go the extra mile to put the limitations of their work front and centre, reviewers can point this out."
So what would it take to publish a paper here on mastodon and do public peer review? Just an agreement to use a few hashtags like #Paper, and in replies things like #PeerReview, #Accept, #Revise, #Reject? Some automatically generated web and pdf output summarising the thread? Submission to something like Zenodo to give a DOI? Linking user accounts to orcid to verify identity? Only real problem I see is that even with markdown and LaTeX, Mastodon posts are not well suited for longer posts with multiple figures etc. Maybe fine for short results though?
Eine Forscherin beklagt, dass zuletzt einzelne Gutachter dreimal den #PeerReview ihrer Manuskripte (wahrscheinlich) für eigene Zwecke missbrauchten … Heute in unserem Blog: https://www.laborjournal.de/blog/?p=13563. Weitere Erfahrungen, Meinungen oder gar Vorschläge dazu?
“The problems with #overpublication, ‘publish or perish’ culture, abusive lab environments, analytical flexibility, p-hacking, clinical trial registration games, grant front-running, intellectual capture, #NonsenseJournals, #FakeJournals, #PeerReview manipulation, moral entrepreneurship, etc. precede the present discussions of paper mills and active falsification/fabrication cases. (1/2)
#academia became a turd that you can't flush down the toilet and keeps farting toxic gasses all over the place. Worst still, "we" keep playing the game, pretending that everything is fine and cheerily announcing another publication in a meaningless rat race of factors.
I am thrilled to announce the release of our second quarter issue. Take a look for excellent peer-reviewed original research on school sports, sexual assault perspectives, heteronormativity, fear of crime, social media, antiracism attitudes, and segregation.
Navigating Publishing Critical Health Communication Research
Hudak, Front. Commun., 2020
"while interpretive and critical scholars are trained to read and analyze social scientific research, the inverse is not true. Post-positivists then review critical research without knowing the basic principles of that world view."
Did anyone receive this kind of review invitation? Perhaps you @j_bertolotti ?
Apparently, they started paying 20 $ for reviewing! It seems that finally, someone paid attention to all the complaints and the quality of the existing peer review process. The fee may seem too low, but here in Turkey 🇹🇷 it equals 650 Turkish lira, which is about one week's groceries. @academicsunite#academia#research#publishing#journals#peerreview
"For the moment, we recommend that if #LLMs are used to write scholarly reviews, reviewers should disclose their use and accept full responsibility for their reports’ accuracy, tone, reasoning and originality."
PS: "For the moment" these tools can help reviewers string words together, not judge quality. We have good reasons to seek evaluative comments from human experts.
In an experimental peer review report, #ChatGPT "made up statistical feedback and non-existent references."
"Peer review is confidential, and privacy and proprietary rights cannot be guaranteed if reviewers upload parts of an article or their report to an #LLM."
EdgeVPN.io is an evolution of the IP-over-P2P (IPOP) project. IPOP started as an IP-based peer-to-peer overlay targeting personal devices, and over time the architecture evolved to adopt various standards, support centralized user/group management, and incorporate software-defined networking, culminating in the current architecture, tailored for research and development in nascent edge computing applications.
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EdgeVPNio is a research project to build networking for the fog, spanning the network continuum from the cloud to its edge. It builds networking cyber-infrastructure which supports emerging IoT era applications.
Looks like this one might be a bit of fun for #p2p people, or i suppose #DistributedSystems people generally. No prior experience reviewing for JOSS is required, experience with Python is required, and some experience with the topic area is preferred. Don't be shy! If you've never done open review before, JOSS is a great place to start. It's a really good way to learn by teaching (or learn by reading!) in a collaborative context. You can reply here or on the pre-review issue to volunteer :)
edit: would love to have some infosec people on this one! even and especially if you are not in academia :)
Happy at my scholar's desk today: after breakfast I prepped a talk about heritage management for politicians on municipal arts & culture boards around Sweden; now I'm tweaking a manuscript that has been accepted with minor modifications by a top journal as per a set of insightful and constructive #peerreview comments.