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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

I think this is good, and may also improve reviews. I doubt that Nature has an issue with substandard reviews, but I have definitely seen it in some of the computer science conferences I submit to and have served on [1]. If reviewers know that their review may be published, I think they may turn in more substantial reviews.

[1] In computer science, conference publications are peer-reviewed and highly competitive. We also have journals, but most novel work appears in conferences. The more theory oriented parts of computer science will tend to publish in journals more, but they still publish in conferences, too.

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Published reviews will just make reviews political in new ways. As a graduate student, I helped my advisor review a paper submitted to Nature that was publishing a large biological data set. The internal metrics that the authors provided made it clear that the data was 95% noise. The review was direct and to the point. The paper was rightfully rejected, but ended up in another high profile journal after the authors removed the damning evidence. The corresponding author was one of the most famous and powerful people in a very large field. My advisor was still a relatively junior professor at the time, even if well known. I don't think publication of the review would have changed things for him, but for many others I have known, it might have.

I'd say this is actually a stronger argument for publishing reviews, as a persuasive argument might prevent venue shopping, potentially in multiple ways, depending on the when.

Ummm. The reviews are only published for the accepted papers - and everything is optional now. So rejected papers can still submit to another journal.

Surely this was happening already without published reviews...?

Yes, but criticizing someone's work in a single-blind and private review leaves less motivation and opportunity for the powerful to be vindictive.

But outside of physics, there's many fields of science where double and even single blind is meaningless. If you get access to the review directly, you can tell by what they say and how they say it who they are. If you're a vindictive powerful person, who cares that you might be wrong?

Just have to publish reviews anonymously, and if there is outcry about it journals can have internal investigations on the matter.

Since this policy will only publish reviews of accepted papers, I don't think it would impact the situation you presented either way.

Good point. However, the primary value of peer review is to reject bad papers. Does science benefit when authors can shuffle a rejected paper to another journal and tweak the results to hide the initial criticism? To me, the real value of reviews is making sure that bad studies never see the light of day (under the current system).

Personally, I am interested in seeing a model where all papers are submitted to a public archive and reviewed publicly (and optionally anonymously). The high profile journals would shift to providing value-added curation, formatting, and commentary.

Indeed. In my experience and other researchers I know, often rival groups will try to block your research from getting published in Nature or Science by asking for unreasonable follow-up experiments. It's sadly very political. Hopefully this will improve things.

I personally know the current Nature chief editor and she totally agrees with my points above. In contrast, I have always found math & CS journal reviews way more fair and rigorous.

Jesus. It's unbelievable that people can be so petty. This is why if I see an academic with tons of high profile publications, it generally signals that they merely know how to play the publication game (and they of course have the desire to do so). This behavior is a red flag imo if it occurs post-tenure.

"Petty" isn't really the right word, because it's not about inconsequential rivalries, it's about real money and careers.

> It's sadly very political

This is the predictable consequence of pre publication review by competitors.

The solution is not to hope for better reviewers. It's to abolish the failed peer review system.

> It's to abolish the failed peer review system.

And replace with...?

In many ways the real peer review comes after publication, when more people have seen the work, and can react to it. In some fields it is not terribly rare for flaws in the work get discovered at that point, and rebuttals get written and circulated (or possibly even published in the journal.)

The prepublication peer review is not always a terribly high bar to pass. It does help to weed out some of the crap, but lots still get published, especially in less competitive journals.

The only reason the review process is politicized is because academic institutions compete for research money. Preventing your peer institutions from publishing helps you get money for your own. You need to change how research is funded. Follow the money.

Politics have been part of the peer review process for a very, very long time. It's not all about the money, either:

> Fourier was interested in heat propagation, and presented a paper in 1807 to the Institut de France on the use of sinusoids to represent temperature distributions. The paper contained the controversial claim that any continuous periodic signal could be represented as the sum of properly chosen sinusoidal waves. Among the reviewers were two of history's most famous mathematicians, Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), and Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827).

> While Laplace and the other reviewers voted to publish the paper, Lagrange adamantly protested. For nearly 50 years, Lagrange had insisted that such an approach could not be used to represent signals with corners, i.e., discontinuous slopes, such as in square waves. The Institut de France bowed to the prestige of Lagrange, and rejected Fourier's work. It was only after Lagrange died that the paper was finally published, some 15 years later.

https://www.dspguide.com/ch8/1.htm

It's not the only reason.

There is also the glory of being the genius leader in your field, and all the prizes, titles and lovers that come with it.

> Preventing your peer institutions from publishing helps you get money for your own. You need to change how research is funded.

Surely removing people's opportunity to veto their competitors publications is a more direct way!

> The only reason the review process is politicized is because academic institutions compete for research money.

Well, publication is also how researchers get promoted by people who can't evaluate their research. There's a within-department need outside of just attracting grants.

Publish your article with accompanying data and programs on sci-hub (github for science).

Tell your colleagues about it if you normally hold seminars before publishing papers, or post to mailing list. As interested people read your paper they will post comments, open issues, or star your repository. If it gets many stars Nature will include a link to it in their monthly list of important works, which would help even more people to find your repository.

> Publish your article with accompanying data and programs on sci-hub (github for science).

How does one publish on Sci-Hub?

I would suggest sites like https://zenodo.org/ or https://osf.io/ for self-publishing research products. Or one's own institution's repository, if they have one (many do, see http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/).

Publish the paper and put the protocols on something like https://www.protocols.io so the results can be reproduced.

There are no repositories or publishing functions on sci-hub. It is only a kind of proxy for already published works.

I did not mean the existing scihub site, but simply something that would be github for science. It seemed to me amusing to reference scihub in the name, but unfortunately looks like it is confusing, and diverts attention from the content of my comment, which is that publishing paper should be similar to publishing a repository on github, and reviewing should be like reviewing pull requests.

That sounds like arXiv.

arXiv doesn't provide a way to review, comment, or rate papers which is needed to replace journals by a better process.

So that Nature will be full of papers from researchers who hire the most clickfarmers to star their work?

Nature would not assign the same value to every star. Star from someone who works in a university and has large impact factor in the related field will have much higher value than a star from newly created account without any published work.

That is then a circular problem. Most people who have high impact right now, know how to play the publishing game.

Turn science into an unmitigated popularity contest, how could that possibly go wrong?!?

Stack overflow is a "popularity contest" and nothing has gone wrong with it so far, and science have always been popularity contest, i am just suggesting to give it better tools to measure the popularity.

The way things were done before the current system took over (in the 1980s, I believe).

Not sure what it was exactly. I heard rumors that the journal often did its own review. Either way, if it was good enough for Einstein and Feynman, it might work for others.

The important thing is that the people whose careers might be upended by revolutionary findings can't stop or steal the ideas.

So you want to replace the current peer review system with one you don’t really understand? Have you tried looking into why the system was changed in the first place?

The fact that it worked for Einstein doesn’t make it a better system. Do you think Einstein wouldn’t have gotten his revolutionary work published with the current system?

> * Do you think Einstein wouldn’t have gotten his revolutionary work published with the current system?*

We'll never know without a control group of current Einsteins...

But yeah, that's the kind of thing I worry about. Einstein did stir up quite a bit of resistance at first.

Below is an interview with a scientist who got his idea "borrowed", and his paper shanked in peer review by the "borrower", who eventually got a nobel on it.

Not that I'd expect anyone to listen through a 2 hour podcast. It is pretty dramatic if you're crazy enough to go for it!

https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY2...

I can second this podcast. It was really quite interesting, and I'd love to hear other biologists comment on it, especially those that were mentioned. I feel like I can't personally have a very accurate picture until then

Btw: The old system was the editor reading and reviewing all submissions himself. The new system of only a quick glance by the editor and then further scrutiny by a peer was instituted for two reasons: 1.) to many submissions for the editor to read all and 2.) increasing specialization. So going back to the old system would either lead to very cursory and potentially incompetent reviews or the increase in the number of editors to a point where all current senior reviewers are now editors. The former is completely intractable and the latter is still worse then the current status quo, especially since it removes the practice of having two or more reviews that specialize at different aspects (e.g. having on reviewer focus on the numerical side of the simulation and another on the statistical side of the comparison with observation data).

> So going back to the old system would either lead to very cursory and potentially incompetent reviews...

Yeah, this is side I'd pick.

I'd rather have many mediocre submissions published fast than the current system. Let the "real" review happens after after the results are public.

I see how reasonable people can pick the other side.

In many many subject areas we already have that through the use of preprint servers such as Arxiv. No need to get rid of the upsides of peer review just to get that.

Then maybe things are pretty reasonable. At least in those fields.

I feel at a disadvantage in this discussion because I don't really now what I'm talking about :)

In my (very limited) experience there are still large differences in the quality of the reviews. As researchers do this basically on the side and for free, the amount of time they devote to a review varies greatly depending on their time budget and motivation. While some reviewers seem to go through the paper character by character and point out even the tiniest flaws, others are contend with a superficial reading and miss even glaring mistakes.

I'd say publishing the reviews is good because it allows you to see how much effort went into the review process. It will also (anonymously) shame the second type of reviewer into being more thorough, which I think is also good.

As a side note, I think articles should all be available for free and the work of the reviewers should be compensated or appreciated somehow. Publishing reviews with the reviewers names (only for people that want it) can help to create such appreciation, because it is a lot of work.

They'll only publish reviews for already accepted papers. This may help reviewers be (or at least appear) less obviously biased against the authors in the review process if the paper has a chance of being accepted. But it won't do anything for papers that 2 or more reviewers want to shut down. Note I'm not talking about low quality research but about papers that are shut down for political reasons (happens often enough in neuroscience at least) so that the reviewers can then do the same experiments and publish before you.

I don't understand how they can get away with this blatant idea-stealing. Isn't there something in the grant process that can punish them for misbehavior? If one team has a laboratory notebook showing they did the work, it seems like a paper trail to the fraudster could easily be constructed.

At the very least, people will be more likely to decline to be a referee for a paper they're less of an expert on or don't have time for if they knew the report would be public.

After seeing some review comments that make it clear the reviewer either had little knowledge of the field or comments that could have been rebutted by cursory view of the data, this seems like a an area that sorely needs improvement.

>area that sorely needs improvement. the simplest idea would be to improve peer-reviewing with moving it to something similiar to hacker-news discussion board (but possibly not open to everyone), where reviewers would comment, authors could respond to questions or clarify something.

I’m not convinced that would work. If the problem is the quality of the review it seems like the reviewers need more vetting, not less. I could see the HN version devolving into a lot of wasted effort responding. It would be even worse if it was allowed to be anonymous.

If it wasn’t anonymous and the reviewers were vetted with respect to the field they were commenting on, it might work

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