voice of the future?

["James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>]

The following Op-Ed appears in today's Harvard Crimson (undergraduate
paper), curiously signed as "Crimson Staff" and not by any individual:

Opinion
Keep Science in Print

Web-only 'journals' increase access to science at the cost of quality
Published On 10/5/2006 3:31:42 AM
By THE CRIMSON STAFF

Getting into Harvard is hard, very hard. Yearly the gatekeepers
in Byerly Hall vet thousands of applicants on their merits,
rejecting many times the number of students that they accept. But
getting a scientific paper published in Science or Nature,
today's pre-eminent scientific journals, is oftentimes harder.

Science, like much of academia, has its own admissions committee.
Though over a million manuscripts are published in journals
yearly, many more are submitted and rejected. The gatekeepers of
science - peer reviewers who are reputable scientists and well
versed in a particular field - advise journal editors whether to
reject a manuscript outright, send it back for revisions, or
publish it. And publication is everything in science. If an
experiment doesn't appear in print, it might as well have never
been performed. But the peer review process, even to researchers,
can seem like a black box. Since the scientists who review the
submitted papers review them anonymously, there is little
accountability - these gatekeepers, some think, have far too much
power over the progress of science.

For these reasons, some in the scientific community have proposed
switching to open-publication, online journals. In one model,
used by the soon-to-launch online journal of the non-profit
Public Library of Science (PLoS), scientists will be able to
publish their papers online for a fee after only nominal editing
by the journal's editors. The review process would take place
online and post-publication. Only in this case, anyone, not just
the author's scientific peers, would be able to post comments and
reviews.

In theory, such a system would transform the scientific community
into true "marketplace of ideas," in which scientific results
would be vetted democratically, instead of by a group of
cloistered elites. Readers would post comments judging the
quality of the work, and an experiment or theory would either be
buoyed by praise and interest, or, if found flawed, drown in a
sea of anonymity. Such a system, proponents argue, would free
science from the trammels of communication that currently retard
its process. Chris Surridge, PLoS ONE's managing editor recently
told the Associated Press, "If we publish a vast number of
papers, some of which are mediocre and some of which are stellar,
Nobel Prize-winning work - I will be happy."

And therein lies the problem.

Without a peer review process to separate the revolutionary
papers from the merely good from the rubbish, scientists will
have no way of knowing which discoveries and experiments merit
their time and interest. Instead, they will spend inordinate
amounts of time wading through the quicksand of junk science to
get to truly interesting work. Peer reviewers are chosen as peer
reviewers for a reason - unlike the hoi polloi that roam the
Internet, they have the knowledge and experience to judge
scientific research on its merits. Furthermore, the peer review
process strengthens papers, as authors are forced to defend their
research's weaknesses - without peer review the temptation to
prematurely publish incomplete or uncontrolled experiments will
be formidable. Far from "a marketplace of ideas," open
publication will create a morass from which science might not
emerge. Results will be duplicated, communication retarded, and
progress slowed to a standstill.

Proponents of open publication who point to advances such as
Grigori Perelman's recent proof of the Poincar=E9 conjecture, which
was posted online instead of submitted to a journal, fail to
realize that such instances are the exception rather than the
rule. True, the traditional peer review process is not perfect.
It delays the flow of information, can sometimes be biased, and
often unduly prioritizes the work of established, famous
scientists over the work of lesser-known researchers. But it is
far better than the alternative.

copyright 2006 The Harvard Crimson
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