Hi denizens,

Now that Biology has gone missing, at least in the programs of the
funding agencies in this part of the world, the reflections that I'm
going to expose concern at best that even smaller field of natural
philosophy that we euphemistically call, not without a twist of candour,
"biomedicine". At worst, they only concern the world whose limits are
the limits of my language.

As I understand it, the main purpose of really existing peer-reviewing
is to act as a filter. By selecting those papers deemed publishable it
spares us the herculean task of reading every possible piece emanating
from our overheated brains. This actually reveals a big problem of
really existing research (with the caveat expressed in the first
paragraph). But I'm not going to venture into that problem: more clever
minds have drowned in its muddy waters. Back to the point, if the need
of publishing were not such a strong source of inspiration and we
researchers would feel the compelling necessity of publishing only when
we could write well-structured and thoughtful papers, full of useful
data and rich in new ideas and hypotheses, we could then read a
reasonable percentage of the papers concerning our fields of interest.
In that utopia, peer-reviewing could be a continuous, transparent and
open process that would involve a relevant part of the community. Not
likely to happen and probably for good: knowledge seems to progress by a
combination of slow accretion of small steps and sudden
(re)interpretations of those steps.

But what is interesting to see in that utopian/dystopian possibility is
that really existing peer-reviewing suffers from a fundamental problem:
statistical significance. Because, what significance is to be deposited
in the opinions, whether reasonably argued or not (another thorny
Pandora box I won't dare to open), of two, three or at best four people
acting as editors or reviewers? Anonymous people in the latter case, to
complete the scene.

In the tension between these requirements trust is suppose to build up
and give us a reasonable path to pursue our noble endeavours. In my
insignificant opinion, in the current state of matters, trust is
seriously broken. Too much pressure to publish, too many journals, too
much money to make from publishing, too restricted and opaque a
peer-reviewing system... As a corollary, my impression is that while
many of us suspect we live in a bubble, we all seem to tacitly expect
that we will not see it explode. A good friend of mine once offered me a
book about the Spanish Armada; no joke. Its title was "The confident
hope of a miracle".

To rebuild trust we need, among other things, to rebuild our tools. And
we better do it before the next big bang. Research is not the only human
activity involving knowledge and its transmission, we could use some
curiosity beyond our noses.

Vale.

Miguel Ortiz Lombardía

Architecture et Fonction des Macromolécules Biologiques (UMR7257)
CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université
Case 932, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France
Tel: +33(0) 491 82 86 44
Fax: +33(0) 491 26 67 20
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.afmb.univ-mrs.fr/Miguel-Ortiz-Lombardia

El 09/10/13 20:04, Navdeep Sidhu escribió:
> John Bohannon wrote about his experience writing "a computer program to generate hundreds of unique papers." Thought some of you might find it of interest:
> 
> John Bohannon. Who's Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342 (Oct. 4, 2013) 60-65.
> DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60
> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
> 
> Best regards,
> Navdeep
> 
> ---
> Navdeep Sidhu
> University of Goettingen
> ---
>