There is intense recent debate over scientific good practices, especially in the making of manuscripts and narrative and data preparation. Open discussion blogs like the Retraction Watch have made a splash about the recent steep increase in the number of retracted papers, expressions of concern, corrigenda. Also, the number of open discussion -- usually anonymous -- blogs like Abnormal Science and Sci-Fraud have increased, and their popularity. I see many cases being exposed, even from close colleagues. Is it just personal impression, or are we in the midst of a fever of scientific misconduct ? Why ?
Dear Matthias, I have read the idea. I am rather skeptical about it... It seems a lot of trouble to get around biased results, which seems to me (at least in my field) the less common kind of misconduct, although the most destructive and one of the hardest to catch. Additionally, the whole scheme established a long-term commitment between authors, reviewers and periodical which seems too different from what we in our field are used to, and possibly willing to, accept. Most discoveries in entomology happen as matter-of-course finds during pilot tests; one never knows which direction the study will ultimately take as all is mistery. Thus I can never guarantee that my original hypothesis will be the right question until most experiments are over. And most importantly, I usuallly cannot predict my intended journal at the beggining of experiments, partially because I am not sure what will come up.
I think the idea is tuned to reality in Medical studies, where maybe too many scientists are making up good results to get lots of money, and many investors are not getting what they expected from the resulting studies. In my field, it seems most misconduct still lies in getting many published papers in the best possible periodicals, thus scientists start awfully many studies, find ways of getting authorship without credit, sexy-up data and narrative to appeal to the best periodicals (which is different from making it all up), plagiarize good ideas and text, try to bribe/compromise editors to get published without fuzz (proper review), etc... I think in my field the proposed method would result in elevated plagiarism and arrangements between reviewers/editors/authors and would actually encourage people submitting several pre-studies to several periodicals and collect as many in final state as possible of the best options, further increasing a crisis of peer-review.
Maybe others think differently?
Sorry for taking a long while to answer. I have founded the Journal of Errology with some scientists from India as an attempt to chance a few things in the publication system. Also we wanted to introduce a comments sections, and it didnt work. In fact, the whole idea of Journal of Errology was appreciated by many, but we gotpractically no submissions. Concerning the comments section, I do not know why, but it should be simple to get it going. I think it is just a matter of habit and scientists are resistant to change. And of course no-one wants to leave a sole comment and have it lying there without answer.
I very like this idea of post-review and it should be coupled with the idea of retraction. I will give it a read now. Thanks for posting!
I think it's just become easier to identify misconduct and to publicize such instances.
Yet if it has become easier and older papers are available, why aren't people finding as much misconduct in these old papers? It should be spread over the time window, I think
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