And this is why peer review is a joke.

[Jasper]

Peer review is, like a wrench, a tool.  You can use it for all sorts of things, but if you're a shrieking ape, you mostly use it to hit things.

[Kai]

The publishers. Example: Elsevier. And they are catching heavy flack right now.

In news related to the OP, one of IJAE editors has resigned over this paper.

Klaudia Brix, a cell biologist at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, says that she tendered her resignation from the board of the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology (IJAE) because she felt that it was important for a journal to function within its scientific "scope".

Others on the 13-member board have also raised concerns. Hanne Mikkelsen, associate professor of molecular medicine at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, says that she too is considering resigning her position.

ETA: When journals self publish, their societies tend to do well enough off the membership and subscription fees. Publishing print is expensive when the publisher's prices are exorbitant.

I am unsurprised about the resignation, and would expect that most scientists will decline to review submissions in the future. If they published that piece of junk in order to increase their visibility, they certainly accomplished that, if they are OK with "visibility" = "on a lot of shit lists".

I don't see any reason they should have expected publishing bad science to get them any more subscriptions. There is little or no reason for any university to pay for a journal that publishes shoddy and unscientific work.

Or for people to join a society that publishes such shill in their journal.

[Jasper]

The strength of peer review is obviously based on the strength of community scrutiny.  It isn't effective if the readership can't think critically.

[Kai]

The publishers. Example: Elsevier. And they are catching heavy flack right now.

ETA: When journals self publish, their societies tend to do well enough off the membership and subscription fees. Publishing print is expensive when the publisher's prices are exorbitant.

Thanks for the info, Kai.

I've only read one of those links so far, but I'm completely infuriated and disgusted.

How long has it been this way?

Probably since printing became more expensive. In the 1920s, it was easy enough for journals to use small publishers because the subscription rates were low, and the articles were mostly text with very few images. The few images that were there, were in black and white. As design became more fancy and subscription rates increased, there was a need for better, larger presses. Now, a small publisher could probably not afford to make a journal issue given the subscription prices and the ability of larger publishers. This is even worse if journals aren't associated with a scientific society of some kind, because then the only oversight is A) the Editors and B) the publisher.

The best market example of how print journals should be published is Freshwater Science, published by the Society for Freshwater Science. Yes, the print versions are quite expensive, but if you have membership you have free access to pdfs of every article from every volume.  Whenever a journal goes open access, or is self published by a society, you can expect at least that the publishing practices will not be like Elsevier.

[LMNO]

Peer review is, like a wrench, a tool.  You can use it for all sorts of things, but if you're a shrieking ape, you mostly use it to hit things.

[Triple Zero]

UK chemist on Elsevier's ban on textmining
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/11/25/the-scandal-of-publisher-forbidden-textmining-the-vision-denied/

Interesting read (you don't actually need to understand chemistry)

[Kai]

UK chemist on Elsevier's ban on textmining
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/11/25/the-scandal-of-publisher-forbidden-textmining-the-vision-denied/

Interesting read (you don't actually need to understand chemistry)

Elsevier can go to hell. No, I'm serious. They do not, as a publisher of scientific journals, actually understand how science articles are used by scientists.

[Kai]

Some possibly good news on the "free scientific information" front.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/lawmakers-reintroduce-public-access.html?ref=hp

Lawmakers yesterday introduced a proposal to make scientific papers funded with taxpayer money available for free on the Internet. The bill adds to a recent flurry of debate about so-called public access policies.

The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which has identical versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, would expand to other research agencies the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) 4-year-old policy requiring investigators it funds to submit copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts for posting in a public database. The bill would also set at 6 months the length of time an agency can wait to make the paper public after it appears in a journal (NIH's current policy is 12 months).

I think this is only fair and right. If the public pays for research through taxes, that research should be freely available to read.

[Telarus]

I agree. Good to see some action on that.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Agreed. It would also be easier for a layman to go and see what the paper says more specifically rather than a poorly written overview in the news. If its jargony though it might be hard to understand. But it would i think help the average persons scientific literacy and if some asshat says something retarded about it in the news comments you can go "read the fucking paper or stfu."

[Freeky]

The thing about scientific research is that if people think they have scientific evidence on their side, they aren't actually going to go read it.

Here's an example.  This couple who has a child, with one parent having two children from previous relationships, are having an argument on, oh I dunno, potty training.  One of them, the one that has two much older children, says that children should be potty trained by two.  The other says "Are you high?" and posits that two is when you start them on it and four and change is probably the upper limit.  When one of them looks for a study on it, and finds research that supports their argument and refutes the other's, the other ends up saying that they are both right and won't read anything.

And that's the problem.  If people aren't already inclined to know facts, actual facts, then they won't go looking for it even if it would support some crackpot jibberish they think they are right about.

[minuspace]

Have been a bit busy lately and not really following the news, so, from an uninformed and conspiratorial perspective, this is what went through my mind:  there's that whole contraception debacle going on in the states as healthcare vs. Catholic church.  Italy published the paper per force of the church to compromise the strength of arguments advocating contraception.  Lending credence to otherwise untenable perspectives artificially polarizes the argument.  The scary side is then the obverse - instead of consolidating a positive resolution, what if some were to benefit from the possible confusion?  This is why I don't make time anymore for the news - it just channels issues to keep me from actually thinking.  I mean really, is the causal link between HIV and aids really what we need to be arguing about?  Of course that was going to be provocative...  That's just not right.

[Kai]

Have been a bit busy lately and not really following the news, so, from an uninformed and conspiratorial perspective, this is what went through my mind:  there's that whole contraception debacle going on in the states as healthcare vs. Catholic church.  Italy published the paper per force of the church to compromise the strength of arguments advocating contraception.  Lending credence to otherwise untenable perspectives artificially polarizes the argument.  The scary side is then the obverse - instead of consolidating a positive resolution, what if some were to benefit from the possible confusion?  This is why I don't make time anymore for the news - it just channels issues to keep me from actually thinking.  I mean really, is the causal link between HIV and aids really what we need to be arguing about?  Of course that was going to be provocative...  That's just not right.

No, it really isn't something we need to be arguing about. What we need to be arguing about, or rather, discussing, is a vaccine for HIV and AIDS treatment methods. Id est, cures and prevention methods instead of the already well supported cause.

[minuspace]

Apart from what already has been said - the one benefit I can think of is that it may challenge people's though about the mechanism involved in the development of HIV so that new angles and vectors are investigated for prevention and cure.  I guess the one thing I gained was thinking about the possibility of a vaccine as a result of not exclusively linking HIV to aids, however, that's just misinformation covering misinformation...

[minuspace]

Apart from what already has been said - the one benefit I can think of is that it may challenge people's though about the mechanism involved in the development of HIV so that new angles and vectors are investigated for prevention and cure.  I guess the one thing I gained was thinking about the possibility of a vaccine as a result of not exclusively linking HIV to aids, however, that's just misinformation covering misinformation...

Or, an analysis of experimental systems over here from Stanford
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,31712.0.html