Pubpeer & progress

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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The real problems of post publication peer review

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.

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A milestone

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?

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Should universities refund grants based on retracted papers?

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.

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Science does not exist without post publication peer review

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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Why gel splicing is not OK

Gel (see footnote at end for a brief description of gels aimed at non-biologists) splicing is a term that describes the cutting and pasting of images of lanes (where 1 lane = 1 sample) and placing the images of the lanes in a different order or even combining lanes from different gels. A more extreme form is to simply shift the subsection of the lane, corresponding to the probed molecule, from one lane to the next.
This is wrong and it always has been. However, in post publication peer review on PubPeer, it is often defended, particularly for “older” papers, from a decade or more ago. This then raises arguments about what was acceptable then and are we shifting the goalposts of scientific integrity? The matter has even been a “Topic” on PubPeer.

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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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Why doesn’t the sun go around the earth?

A recent post at Retraction Watch revealed that Fazlul Sarkar of Wayne State University is behind the attempt to lift the anonymity of commenters at PubPeer
The Spectroscope has posted The REAL threat to PubPeer is a real threat to science communication.

I agree entirely.

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Counting the cost of misconduct

Last week at Retraction Watch (RW) there was a post on a paper in elife by Andrew Stern, Arturo Casadevall, Grant Steen, and Ferric Fang that put a figure on the cost of research misconduct, using misconduct officially identified by the ORI.

A number of comments on RW, including my own, highlighted that the study necessarily (because it had to use hard data) resulted in an underestimate of the financial cost of misconduct by a least a factor of 10. I thought it useful to summarise my views in what follows.

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