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Where peer-review went wrong
[Note: this post is by Mike. Matt hasn't seen it, may not agree with it, and would probably have advised me not to post it if I'd asked him.] The magic is going out of my love-affair with peer-review....
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Some more of peer-review’s greatest mistakes
Last time I argued that traditional pre-publication peer-review isn’t necessarily worth the heavy burden it imposes. I guess no-one who’s been involved in the review process — as an author, editor or...
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What is this peer-review process anyway?
Let me begin with a digression. (Hey, we may as well start as we mean to go on.) Citations in scientific writing are used for two very different reasons, but because the two cases have the same form we...
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Dear Royal Society, please stop lying to us about publication times
I’ve recently written about my increasing disillusionment with the traditional pre-publication peer-review process [post 1, post 2, post 3]. By coincidence, it was in between writing the second and...
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We will no longer provide peer reviews for Royal Society journals until they...
If you haven’t already read the last post, please go do so before reading this one. Please also see this response from the editorial office of Biology Letters. I’ve discussed all of what follows with...
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Biology Letters does trumpet its submission-to-acceptance time
Just a quick one for Matt Butler, who in a comment on the orignal postwrote: I just looked on the BL website, and the only infromation I could find was “Articles submitted to Biology Letters benefit...
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Lying about submission times at other journals?
Folks, In response to our recent post about reject-when-you-mean-revise and submission-date massaging at Royal Society journals, Susie Maidment tweeted: @H_Mallison as far as I can tell this is pretty...
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Discussing Biology Letters with the Royal Society
Last Friday I got an email from Dr Stuart Taylor, Commercial Director of the Royal Society, wanting to set up a phone-call to talk about the issue I raised about the editorial procedure on Biology...
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What is the difference between a paper and a blog post?
As things stand there are two principal types of written communication in science: papers and blog posts. We’ve discussed the relative merits of formally published papers and more informal publications...
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What would happen if I publicly posted the reviews I receive?
After the authors’ own work, the biggest contribution to a published paper is the reviews provided, gratis, by peers. When peer-review works as it’s supposed to, they add significant value to the final...
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Well, that about wraps it up for peer-review
[See part 1, part 2 and part 3 from a few months ago.] I’m horrified, but not as surprised as I would like to be, by a new paper (Welch 2012) which analyses peer-reviewer recommendations for eight...
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Open peer-review at PeerJ
There are a lot of things to love about PeerJ, which of course is why we sent our neck-anatomy paper there. I’ll discuss another time how its pricing scheme changes everything for Gold OA in the...
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Publishers do not manage peer-review, either. We do.
I was reading Stephen Curry’s excellent summary of Monday’s Royal Society’s conference on “Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research”. One point that Stephen made is: [David...
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The only winning move is not to play
The problem I find myself reading a lot recently about “portable peer-review” — posts like Take me as I am, and my paper as it is? by scicurious at Neurotic Physiology, which excellently diagnoses a...
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If you are remotely interested in archosaurian breathing, you need to read...
Schachner et al. (2013: Figure 13): Diagrammatic representations of the crocodilian (A) and avian (B) lungs in left lateral view with colors identifying proposed homologous characters within the...
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Peer review does not mean we can trust a published paper
“The benefit of published work is that if they have passed the muster of peer review future researchers can have faith in the results”, writes a commenter at The Economist. Such statements are...
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Dear PLOS ONE: time to sort out your multiple review tracks
Here at SV-POW!, we are an equal-opportunity criticiser of publishers: Springer, PLOS, Elsevier, the Royal Society, Nature, we don’t care. We call problems as we see them, where we see them. Here is...
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The Royal Society has taken some steps to improving reporting of...
Last October, we published a sequence of posts about misleading review/reject/resubmit practices by Royal Society journals (Dear Royal Society, please stop lying to us about publication times; We will...
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Reviews for our Barosaurus preprint
Yesterday I announced that our new paper on Barosaurus was up as a PeerJ preprint and invited feedback. I woke up this morning to find its third substantial review waiting for me. That means that this...
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John Bohannon’s peer-review sting against Science
An extraordinary study has come to light today, showing just how shoddy peer-review standards are at some journals. Evidently fascinated by Science‘s eagerness to publish the fatally flawed Arsenic...
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