Re: voice of the future?

[Richard Feinman <RFeinman@downstate.edu>]

"But it is far better than the alternative." I thought this was a new
idea. I thought we haven't tried the alternative yet. Was this opinion
paper peer-reviewed?

Richard D. Feinman
RFeinman@downstate.edu


"James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>
Sent by: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
10/05/06 09:12 PM
Please respond to
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Subject:  voice of the future?

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 Poincare 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