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The case for Open Research: does peer review work?
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on the Case for Open Research, this time looking at issues with peer review. The previous three have looked at the mis-measurement problem, the authorship problem and the accuracy of the scientific record. This blog follows on from the last and asks – if peer review is working why are we facing issues like increased retractions and the inability to reproduce considerable proportion of the literature? (Spoiler alert – peer review only works sometimes.) Again, there is an entire corpus of research behind peer review, this blog post merely scrapes the surface. As a small indicator, there has been a Peer Review Congress…
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Lifting the lid on peer review
This blog describes some of the insights that emerged from two sets of discussions with academics at Cambridge University organised by Cambridge University Press last year. The topic was peer review and the two sessions were a group of editors in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the other a group of editors in the Science, Technical, Medical and Engineering areas. The themes that emerged echoed many of the issues that were raised in the associated blog ‘The case for Open Research: does peer review work?‘. If anything, the discussion paints a darker picture of the peer review landscape. Themes included the challenges of finding and retaining reviewers, the reviewing demand on…
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The case for Open Research: reproducibility, retractions & retrospective hypotheses
This is the third instalment of ‘The case for Open Research’ series of blogs exploring the problems with Scholarly Communication caused by having a single value point in research – publication in a high impact journal. The first post explored the mis-measurement of researchers and the second looked at issues with authorship. This blog will explore the accuracy of the research record, including the ability (or otherwise) to reproduce research that has been published, what happens if research is retracted, and a concerning trend towards altering hypotheses in light of the data that is produced. Science is thought to progress through the building of knowledge through questioning, testing and checking work. The…
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The case for Open Research: the authorship problem
This is the second in a blog series about why we need to move towards Open Research. The first post about the mis-measurement problem considered issues with assessment. We now turn our attention to problems with authorship. Note that as before this is a topic of research in itself – and there is a rich vein of literature to be mined here for the interested observer. Hyperauthorship In May last year a high energy physics paper was published with over 5,000 authors. Of the 33 pages in this article, the paper occupied nine with the remainder listing the authors. This paper caused something of a storm of protest about ‘hyperauthorship’ (a term coined in 2001 by Blaise Cronin).…
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The case for Open Research: the mis-measurement problem
Let’s face it. The biggest blockage we have to widespread Open Access is not researcher apathy, a lack of interoperable systems, or an unwillingness of publishers to engage (although these do each play some part) – it is the problem that the only thing that counts in academia is publication in a high impact journal. This situation is causing multiple problems, from huge numbers of authors on papers, researchers cherry picking results and retrospectively applying hypotheses, to the reproducibility crisis and a surge in retractions. This blog was intended to be an exploration of some solutions prefaced by a short overview of the issues. Rather depressingly, there was so much material…
