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Archive for the ‘Post publication peer review’ Category


A recent article on bioarchiv “Amending published articles: time to rethink retractions and corrections?” puts forwards ideas on how we might change the way we deal with retractions and corrections. (more…)

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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. (more…)

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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. (more…)

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During a quick scan this morning of the “recent” comments on Pubpeer, an activity that I pursue regularly, as part of my reading, there seemed to be a lot more author responses.  So I counted.

70 articles featured with comments.

10 of these had an author response.

This is progress. I have no data, but my impression is that a year ago author comments were far rarer, maybe 1% or thereabouts. Now we are at 14%. Let’s hope this is not an anomaly, but a trend, and maybe in a few years papers without author responses will be in the minority.

Regardless of arguments about anonymity, etc., post publication peer review is growing, which is a sign of health in the scientific enterprise.

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I went to a most useful talk this morning by Stephen Carlton (@LivUniOA) on the Univeristy repository. I had whinged about this as being nearly unusable, but then I jumped in on an early version.

The repository is now useable, though it is quirky. A few lessons from my efforts to update my entries.
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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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Discussion surrounding post publication peer review (previous post here seems to be growing and one issue that is frequently raised is anonymity. In a PLOS Medicine editorial Hilda Bastian argues that current post publication peer review is over focussed on what apparently is wrong in papers and that anonymity is a threat to effective post publication peer review.
A PubPeer thread takes issue with these and some other points and I have also joined in (I am Peer2). We should remember that any notion of power has nothing to do with scientific capability – indeed there may even be an inverse relation. So providing those with the least power (so the most disenfranchised) a means to participate in post publication peer review is essential. Though we have no data on PubPeer, PubMed Commons is a venue for the established. There are some critiques, there is also a fair amount of hagiography too. I would hazard a guess that PubPeer is far more diverse in terms of the career stage of participants and in terms of their gender/social group. Certainly my anecdotal evidence suggests as much, and that is all I have to go on. (more…)

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Sometime last night this blog received its 50,000th page view. I write this blog because I like to. That others find the content worth reading at times is lovely, thank you.

What has been read the most and the least? (more…)

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Leonid Schneider has a guest post on Retraction Watch “What if universities had to agree to refund grants whenever there was a retraction?” that has generated a lot of discussion. My own comment became so long that I am posting it below. For those who are not aware, in the USA, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has the power to reclaim from institutions grant funding acquired through fraudulent means, e.g., manipulated or made up data, though there is a time limit and this is only exerted in a fraction of the cases investigated by ORI. No other country has a similar or analogous mechanism.

I like Leonid Schneider’s idea. (more…)

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An excellent article on the coming of age of post publication peer review by Emma Stoye is up at Chemistry World
She quotes me (correctly) as stating that “Science does not exist without post publication peer review. If anyone wants to follow the quote up, my own posts can be found here.

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