Hacker News Reader

There is an increasing awareness of the "reproducibility crisis"[1] where it seems a large portion of published scientific studies have dubious findings.

I wonder if this is another argument to overthrow Elsevier to as clearly their peer review for publication is a poor filter. Or, is it possible the peer review process will become even weaker in a new more open paradigm?

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778

View on HN

It's not Elsevier-specific peer review that's under scrutiny, but institutionalised peer review in general. That's said, that's still only among a minority of academics, and considering academia is pretty conservative, I don't think that that will play a large role in this situation.

Maybe for open Internet publishing, instead of publish/don't publish peer review, it'd make sense to have a rating of the reproducibility. If you could search only for reproducible papers that met a threshold, you'd know what you were reading.

Unfortunately, that requires people to actually attempt to reproduce papers and to publish about that, and often nobody wants to fund that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com