2017 Resolution

A little late this year, but then there are many calendars, so it is surely the start of the New Year for someone, somewhere, today.

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Withdrawing my labour

I made my first New Year’s resolution on December 31, 2013: to only undertake reviews for open access and learned society journals.  This I have stuck to well, as I noted a year later for the simple reasons that it makes sense and it frees up my time.

Today I had a request to review a manuscript for Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports, and I realised that I need to clarify my position.

I am on strike.

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We are afraid

A tweet brought me to a PeerJ blog post on the uptake of open peer review. The post is worth reading. At PeerJ open review is an option – authors and reviewers can opt in or out, and only if both opt in is the reviewing history of a paper published.  One thing that caught my eye was that while 80% of authors opt in, the total number of paper with open reviews is just 40%, which indicates that reviewers are more reticent.

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FGFs in tissue repair

Our review on fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) as tissue repair and regeneration factors, which we made available as a preprint from the time of submission is now published at PeerJ.

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Groundhog day

Much has been written about the peer review process and its flaws. Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal has stated that since peer-review doesn’t work, we shouldn’t do it

I have recently come across another example of the flaws in peer review. I reviewed a manuscript last year and identified what I believed to be technical problems and suggested at least major revision. The other two reviewers agreed; the three of us had homed in independently on the same technical issues.

Move forward a year and the paper is published in another (equally “prestigious”) journal, no changes.

So I will now amend my New Year resolution (still holding firm) from 2014 and 2015.

In addition to only reviewing for open access journals, I will from now on only review for journals where the review is open and published or where I am free to publish the review. That, at least, will avoid the ethical tension between participating in anonymous peer-review and then wanting to publish the critique when nothing has changed in the paper.

Why Groundhog day? This is not the first time I have had this experience.

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Responding to questions raised on PubPeer

I am a fan of PubPeer, as it provides a forum for discussion between authors and the wider community, something I have discussed in a number of posts (two examples being here and here). Two days ago, My colleague Mike Cross came by my office, having just delivered a pile of exam scripts for second marking (it’s exam and marking season), asking if I had seen a comment on our paper on PubPeer. I had not – too many e-mails and too busy to look at incoming!
So I looked at the question, which relates to panels in two figures being identical in our paper on neuropilin-1 and vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGFA) – indeed they are labelled as being identical.

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Are we there yet?

The question relates to what Langmuir termed “Pathological Science”, simply put “people are tricked into false results … by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions“. There is a lot of pathological science and I only use the examples below, because I am most familiar with them; for nanoparticles, I have a personal interest in understanding these materials, since I use them to try to make biological measurements, e.g., here.

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My opinion: pure bovine excrement

I need a “Bullshit-O-Meter”, which would determine the purity of bovine excrement that at times heads my way. In a previous post, “Why doesn’t the sun go around the earth?”, I put forth my views on the case brought by Fazlul Sarkar that aims to lift the anonymity of PubPeer. This led to an e-mail from Weishi Meng, which starts (note I have redacted the co-addressee).

“Dear Drs. XXX and Fernig,

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Policing the police

The end of this week has seen two very insightful postings on science and governance by Stephen Curry and Neuroskeptic.

Stephen Curry’s post “Who governs science” has what is for me a pithy summary of how science works: “No-one is in charge … …. That structure, or rather, lack of structure has not been arrived at by design but reflects the organic emergence of the scientific enterprise over the past several hundred years… …It poses challenges for good governance but is at the same time a source of great strength.”

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The burden of proof

This post has been stimulated by a post on PubPeer entitled “A crisis of trust”
This post should be required reading for all engaged in research and in the management of the institutions involved in research, including funders and journal editors. I made a brief comment, relating to a sentence that is some way down the post:

“This could be done if together we invert the burden of proof. It should be your responsibility as a researcher to convince your peers, not theirs to prove you wrong”.

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