It's an over reaction if you have a decade to argue with morons.
I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected, then when they are finally published the other editors of the journal that rejected them came crawling in asking for the next paper in the series and promising the front page. Worse they ran a news story about our paper _in the journal that rejected it_ saying how groundbreaking it was.
The only people who think peer review still works are people who have never used it or people who have never had a novel idea in their lives.
> I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected
And for people who aren't in academia, lets just say the unspoken part: While one or more of the reviewers are actively trying to replicate the work so they can beat you to submission after rejecting you.
As an outside observer, it does seem that the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt. No wonder academia is crumbling - it deserves to, and it needs to be replaced with a new, better system.
We must live in different worlds, I’ve been literally blown away by the advances I’ve seen and the new research coming out in the past 40 years. In some ways it feels like we are just getting started, especially in bio. We finally have the tools to discover the wonderful nano machines that make up life and people are using them in wonderful ways.
The commenter was talking about biology and you are talking about physics. Just because your view of one field stagnates doesn't mean the rest of science doesn't, and your quip about stamp collecting (referring to that sneering quote) means you are thinking in memes and are not a serious interlocutor
Understanding how a bunch of baroque proteins interact is the definition of stamp collecting. As a meat bag made up of such machines
I appreciate it for what it is. As a intelligence capable of abstraction I don't measure our progress in science by the number of stamps in our collection.
There are no big ideas, biology included, because peer review is only there for small ideas.
"Co-author" lol we both know what that means. Still, if that's true that makes it even sadder. Hope you mature and broaden your horizons at some point instead of engaging in undergrad-style petty field rivalries
What does this mean “it’s the left that’s the problem”? The right’s solution to academic reform is literal pseudoscience. And I don’t mean this as whataboutism—I’m responding to the implication that some political faction other than the left has the right answer, and I don’t know who that would be.
> Anyone pointing out the obvious - that peer review is broken and science hasn't worked in 40 years - is at best a flat Earther.
Yes, if someone claims that science hasn't worked (what does it even mean?) for 40 years then he's not that far from being flat Eather. It's hard to expect other side to be reasonable while making such absurd claims.
It would only be effective if the significance of this work is clear. They certainly felt this message needed to reach people, and that it did work makes it self evident they were probably right.
Journalists believing what you tell them says nothing about if the underlying work is actually significant.
The legacy of bad science being picked up is why this is a bad idea, even you personally don’t think it’s an issue the risk reward isn’t about just you.
There are other quotes that do think it’s significant. Why do you think the more critical scientists are more correct?
> John Glass, a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the study. “It is dazzling that she has put these things all together,” he said.
> “We’re going to remember this moment,” said Roseanna Zia, a computational biologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the project.
Maybe you prefer scientists who put their money where their mouth is (even if that’s a conflict of interest)
> When Dr. Adamala showed SpudCell to Dr. Endy… (a synthetic biologist at Stanford University) … last year, he was so awestruck that he decided to help her found Biotic, the nonprofit organization intended to create a community of SpudCell researchers. “I’m pouring my life’s work into this,” Dr. Endy said.
I’m going to give some advice that you probably won’t understand for years, but when you don’t find value in a process you’re missing something about what it’s doing.
A common shortcut is to look past who is making money to who is paying for that process and why they would want to pay for it.
In this case, the process is paid for by the government, and the reason they do it is that they wish to outsource the decision of which scientists on their payroll should be promoted.
If you're willing to stipulate their goals, it's easy to understand why they appreciate this system. But there is no benefit to other parties. As far as society is concerned, this is a big loss and an unforced error.
You’re mistaken in thinking it’s paid for by the government, though yes many governments are collectively a significant funding source they are far from the only funding source here.
The most critical function by far is it saves people doing research vast amounts of time. That includes people working at pharmaceutical companies, students, and non profits etc not just government employees. Thus why private colleges who don’t do cutting edge research as well as private labs etc still subscribe to such journals and thus fund the system.
This is a vast win for society. Could it be improved, sure, but you need to understand the value in order to build something that’s an actual improvement.
>The legacy of bad science being picked up is why this is a bad idea, even you personally don’t think it’s an issue the risk reward isn’t about just you
Who do you believe should be the gatekeeper here? Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?
> Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?
Because the scientists involved and reporters manifestly do a bad job about picking what is or isn’t groundbreaking and more importantly have various incentives to hype things up.
CERN scientists with the whole FTL neutrino particle were actively skeptical of the results and still held a press conference on the topic. As to reporters, you’re welcome to go through the published stories about the topic and notice how rarely getting the distance wrong was brought up even when the scientists involved where skeptical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_n...
The general public is utterly incompetent at judging science. Homeopathy is the tip of the iceberg of ignorance.
You didn’t answer the actually interesting question I posed, who should be the gatekeeper instead?
Yes, yes, journalists and scientists have bad incentives and the general public is dumb. You’re not exactly setting the world on fire with that observation. The problem is that there is no better alternative. Any conceivable gatekeeper to scientific knowledge will be no smarter than the research scientists producing the results and will certainly have problematic incentives of their own. And a gatekeeper will also lack the local knowledge that might determine whether the information might helpful or harmful to the potential reader.
Programming reinvented a similar system of peer review before commits. It’s not that the reviewer is more knowledgeable about the bits of the system being changed that makes this work it’s that they have enough expertise to understand what’s involved and a new set of eyes on the problem.
In science having multiple journals acts as a safety valve here, but the underlying principle is very similar. As much as some people bad mouth it, peer review is a very low hurdle before publication that still catches a great number of mistakes.
> Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.
No knowledge on this particular situation. My guess is that they wanted to protect their work by getting it out there. This prevents someone from stealing it during the peer review process.
If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"
Whenever i sit down to read research, I remind myself of Lockheed Martin reading the USSR published research[0] on how electromagnetic waves scatter off of surfaces, and using that to fuel the initial stealth technology. The leading theory being that the USSR didn't recognize how brilliant and revolutionary ability these calculations were.
Just because I can't see the immediate brilliance, doesn't mean it is not brilliant in it's own right.
There is a similar story with the discovery of buckey-balls. A researcher at University of Houston had data that demonstrated buckey-balls were created, but he didn't fully understand what he was looking at. Then a researcher at Rice saw the data and recognized c-60 was being created, so he bought the data and the process and then "invented" carbon balls
I'm not suggesting you tell no-one about your ideas, but if you can't convince people who know the field, turning to laypeople instead is the hallmark of a crank.
Extraornary claims should require extraornary proof, not a credulous audience.
Distribution is trivially easy these days. All publishing does is say "yup, this is some legit science alright". It's a stamp of approval. Blessed by the publisher. To get this blessing you have to fulfil a set of requirements ranging from promoting good science to "thats just how its done, thats how we always done it" to the whims of a particular reviewer. You play the game you get the prize. But if you don't need the prize then you don't need to play.
That's being kind; it's a complete overreaction, simply put.