And this is why peer review is a joke.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

He doesn't even appear to know what the words he is using mean.

[Kai]

Hahaha is this guy even an epidemiologist? What is he talking about? I'm not very far in, but so far a large percentage of his premise seems to be based on the expectation that all viruses behave like the flu.

Exactly. They use "classical germ theory" as the basis for their whole argument, that all viral epidemics everywhere ever take a particular form. Ever. Always.

And yes, you were right about social and political repugnance. Despite how dirty I feel, it wasn't even an issue in this case. The paper was just so /bad/.

And maybe that's why it only caught controversy rather than being ripped to bits. It was published in such an obscure journal that most people can't get a copy, and therefore it escapes direct attacks on the content. Science hipsters: "We published research in this journal, you've probably never heard of it. It's not even subscribed to by most universities. Aren't we awesome? Oh, you're criticizing it, did you even read it?"

The editor of that journal and whoever "peer reviewed" it should have been more interested in career suicide than notoriety, because by publishing it they are essentially making a claim that they found, in reviewing it, that the study methods and data are scientifically sound, and I cannot imagine for a moment being willing to associate my academic name with such an assertion.

If you have tenure, not much rattles your academic "name". Sad but true. And the journal is so obscure that I really think very few people will actually read this article, just hear about it.

[AFK]

Kai- simmons only has it in electronic form and access is restricted to faculty and students :/

Restricted science.

Oh, America...How I love thee.

It's not just America.  And it's just the nature of peer viewed research.  Research Journals are very good at making sure their articles are only viewable by people who have the rights to view them.  That is, they've paid the subscription fee for the Journal.  In educational settings the colleges pay the fee but then are able to confer the ability to view articles to staff and students. 

Honestly, musicians and bands could probably take a tip or two from these guys to figure out how they can protect their intellectual property.  Granted, I'm sure with some heavy digging, it's probably to find pirated copies of research articles somewhere.  But it's much more challenging than finding a free copy of Nickelback's latest CD. 

[Kai]

Kai- simmons only has it in electronic form and access is restricted to faculty and students :/

Restricted science.

Oh, America...How I love thee.

It's not just America.  And it's just the nature of peer viewed research.  Research Journals are very good at making sure their articles are only viewable by people who have the rights to view them.  That is, they've paid the subscription fee for the Journal.  In educational settings the colleges pay the fee but then are able to confer the ability to view articles to staff and students. 

Honestly, musicians and bands could probably take a tip or two from these guys to figure out how they can protect their intellectual property.  Granted, I'm sure with some heavy digging, it's probably to find pirated copies of research articles somewhere.  But it's much more challenging than finding a free copy of Nickelback's latest CD.

It's not "just the nature of peer reviewed research". Otherwise, there wouldn't be any open access journals, or journals that allow you to make your articles open access by paying a small fee.

Prior to the mid twentieth century, there was no way to get access to journal articles except by finding an original print copy. Back then the cost was to pay for the printing, and nearly everyone in a particular field has subscriptions to the necessary journals, because there weren't many of them. And if you didn't have a subscription, all you had to do was send a letter to the author. Sending other people copies of your publications was common courtesy, and was necessary to the free spread of ideas in science.

Once photo-copying came along, you no longer had to get an original. This is when things started to change, because now anyone could have their own copy, and the number of copies possible became infinite. Less people had direct subscriptions, but printing was also becoming cheaper.

With the onset of document files like PDFs and the public demand for articles to be electronic, the university systems became the major distributors of science because the subscriptions became very expensive. Journals couldn't afford the printing costs otherwise, because less and less people had a subscription. This has been a bad thing for science overall. When institutions become the gatekeepers for knowledge, only a select few who are affiliated with those universities can access that knowledge.

Which is why open access science like PLoSOne are such 'Bob'-sends. Now the gatekeepers are dissolving again. Most of the journals are still print, yes, but there is a great movement away from that, and towards only having print when necessary. Anyone can, for example, read directly about the discovery of the new deep ocean vent ecosystems discovered in the Antarctic Basin. Indeed, PLoS is replacing Science and Nature as the most prestigious journal for precisely that reason: people are familiar with it, can access it, and can freely share it. This is as it should be.

[Kai]

And I repeat: the point of publishing science is not to make money. The point of publishing science is to share ideas. Publishing ideas in a journal so obscure that nearly no one has access to it and then claming it refutes years of research is BAD SCIENCE. It is antithetical to publishing science in the first place. You can't compare it to literature or music, because scientific information is meant to be shared. It's meant to be used over and over with the only repayment being proper attribution. It gets written into other papers, books, talked about publicly, in schools and university, on the streets, shared at professional meetings, torn to shreds by other researchers and altered to discover new things.

HAH! I just realized that scientific information is under a Creative Commons license, whether the publishers want to believe it or not.

[AFK]

Okay, perhaps I put it crudely but that was what I was getting at.  Direct access to original peer-reviewed research.  It's tough if you aren't a college student/employee or if you don't want to shell out some considerable bucks for access.  So we are left with news stories which offer short summaries of research but really don't give you enough information for critical assessments of the work. 

Though it's a little better than it was now with things like Google Scholar where you can refine searches to freely available articles.  But that still offers a significant limitation and can impact a person's search for information and what conclusions they come to. 

[Kai]

Okay, perhaps I put it crudely but that was what I was getting at.  Direct access to original peer-reviewed research.  It's tough if you aren't a college student/employee or if you don't want to shell out some considerable bucks for access.  So we are left with news stories which offer short summaries of research but really don't give you enough information for critical assessments of the work. 

Though it's a little better than it was now with things like Google Scholar where you can refine searches to freely available articles.  But that still offers a significant limitation and can impact a person's search for information and what conclusions they come to.

I've never been happy with the "go search for similar articles" loophole, because if I want general information about a topic, I'll use a book. When I am looking for a journal article, I am searching because it holds very specific information that was not ever published anywhere else. I am looking for details. Since journal articles are supposed to be original research with new ideas or information, a similar article is probably not going to hold the bit of information I am looking for. This is especially true in Natural History research. If I want the type description of a particular species of insect, there is only one paper that holds that information, and if I can't get that paper I probably will be unable to get that information.

[AFK]

Yeah, it's pretty much the same situation in social sciences, and it can be very frustrating at times. 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It was always my understanding that "peer review" meant that you published an article, and everyone else got to take a crack at it via independent confirmation.  If you're right, then it's been tested.  If you're pulling a Fleischman & Pons, you get slapped down.  If you're mistaken, it gets pointed out.

I can understand the need for "gatekeepers", but if being published in a peer-reviewed journal now implies that the idea is accepted, then it serves no purpose.

[Kai]

It was always my understanding that "peer review" meant that you published an article, and everyone else got to take a crack at it via independent confirmation.  If you're right, then it's been tested.  If you're pulling a Fleischman & Pons, you get slapped down.  If you're mistaken, it gets pointed out.

I can understand the need for "gatekeepers", but if being published in a peer-reviewed journal now implies that the idea is accepted, then it serves no purpose.

There are two types of peer review: pre-publication and post-publication.

Pre-publication peer review is formal and supposed to weed out the crap, check the logic, make sure it's readable, and improve the paper before publication. Some people will send all their papers to Nature and Science, for example, knowing that they will get rejected. Then move to the next highest journal in terms of prestige. By the time they get to a journal that will accept the paper, the article is significantly improved due to the comments from reviewers.

While pre-publication review refines the paper, post publication review determines whether it is right or wrong beyond the simple checking of logic. Not only that, but the informal discussion of post-publication review (which is, incidentally, what we are doing in this thread) determines an article's significance.

In the case of the AIDS refutation article, it shouldn't have been published. It's logic and premise are so faulty and outdated that it should have been outright rejected. Lest we all waste our time reading articles providing "evidence" for young earth creationism or pangenesis, or reinventions of calculus.

[Triple Zero]

Kai- simmons only has it in electronic form and access is restricted to faculty and students :/

Restricted science.

Oh, America...How I love thee.

This is a world-wide thing, actually.

The scientific community doesn't make a big stink about it, because as long as they're doing science, most of the time they're accessing these journals and papers from a university network, which automatically lets you in--when a university subscribes to a major journal they just add the university's IP block to a whitelist.

You don't realize how much papers actually are completely inaccessible to the Muggles until you leave uni, at which point you don't run into it as a problem as often anymore, for lack of doing much research.

[AFK]

I think the arena is important.  If we are just talking within the scientific community, or, the part of the scientific community interested in the particular area of science, that's one game.  But then you have the arena of the general public and public policy.  And I think we've seen the recent anti-intellectual shift in mainstream America over the past few years. 

So I'm not so sure it really is that much of a given that if something is published in a peer-review jounal that the idea is accepted.  Maybe within a specific sector of science, but then the question must be asked, does that even matter? 

I think another point, and maybe this is more true in social sciences, but many peer-reviewed work really represents baby steps in terms of accepting and adopting an idea.  That is, many research projects will kind of answer the research question, but will often raise several other questions that need to be examined further. 

[Kai]

Incidentally, I'm reading the January issue of Annals of the Entomological Society of America, and the first article is a letter to the editor concerning a claim in a previous article that those authors were the first to investigate a particular issue in leaf cutting ants. The letter is about how they weren't the first people to investigate this, and instead of demanding a correction built upon the research by both groups. It was very classy.

Also, a little less than one third of the articles in this issue are labeled as open access. The authors have paid for them to be freely available. The only reason I can't link to it right now is that they don't go up online until a while after the print is sent out.

[Kai]

I think the arena is important.  If we are just talking within the scientific community, or, the part of the scientific community interested in the particular area of science, that's one game.  But then you have the arena of the general public and public policy.  And I think we've seen the recent anti-intellectual shift in mainstream America over the past few years. 

So I'm not so sure it really is that much of a given that if something is published in a peer-review jounal that the idea is accepted.  Maybe within a specific sector of science, but then the question must be asked, does that even matter? 

I think another point, and maybe this is more true in social sciences, but many peer-reviewed work really represents baby steps in terms of accepting and adopting an idea.  That is, many research projects will kind of answer the research question, but will often raise several other questions that need to be examined further.

Any good paper should raise questions in the conclusions that other researchers can take and run with.

[Triple Zero]

It was always my understanding that "peer review" meant that you published an article, and everyone else got to take a crack at it via independent confirmation.  If you're right, then it's been tested.  If you're pulling a Fleischman & Pons, you get slapped down.  If you're mistaken, it gets pointed out.

I can understand the need for "gatekeepers", but if being published in a peer-reviewed journal now implies that the idea is accepted, then it serves no purpose.

They're just supposed to maintain some measure of scientific quality, in a sense. Being published in a peer-reviewed journal should mean the logic is sound, the tone is factual, and it's not deliberately ignoring most of the other published research on the topic.

With that, you can assume the conclusion at least has some merit, although that doesn't mean it's accepted as fact, and it can still be picked apart or refuted by new research.

Thing is, peer-reviewed publications are also getting cited by other research papers, so yes it is necessary that the peer-review process guarantees at least some level of accuracy.

In this case, that obviously failed.

Which brings me to Nigel's "career suicide" remark. I wonder, is peer-review anonymous? Could we find out who approved this poop?

And one more remark about papers being or not being freely available to the public, I was going to elaborate on that but Kai already said everything I wanted to say, except to point out that if, as a Muggle, you want to order just a single publication, that's 2-10 pages or so, expect to pay about $30 for it. That's ridiculous, because the journals don't make that kind of costs, they don't even pay commission for the content (because getting published is reward of its own--researcher is more likely to get funding), there's a minor cost of printing, and I dunno what the peer-reviewing costs, but it can't be that much. Especially not when you consider what universities all over the world must already be paying to get on the blanket access IP whitelist.

Which brings me to Kai's remark about Creative Commons, I don't understand what you mean? Which scientific information is licensed as CC? (also, which particular CC version?) Surely not all of it. Most often the copyright automatically defers to the university or faculty.