The Internet has given artists and authors many new avenues for getting their work to the masses, completely cutting out the information gatekeepers, the record companies and publishers, which often refuse to publish certain controversial pieces and exact a hefty fee for acting as the unnecessary middleman.
Far from being the high seas ruled by outlaws and pirates, we find that the Internet is more akin to a vast ocean of possibilities – unfettered by the small minds of those who are already comfortably ruling their respective spheres of influence. However, there is no sphere more important than that of science itself, which is why its good to hear that a few biologists have chosen to publish online first.
Carol Greider is one of three Nobel Prize laureate biologists who published their work online in February, before sending it to a scholarly journal for a lengthy review for “official” publication.
She then tweeted the confirmation with the hashtag ASAPbio:
Dear Dr. Greider, We are pleased to inform you that the above manuscript has passed screening and will be online shortly. Cant wait #ASAPbio
— Carol Greider (@CWGreider) February 29, 2016
She represents a growing minority of scientists who contributed to the more than 2,000 “preprints” published on the publicly-accessible website bioRxiv (a small drop in the ocean of about a million research papers that get published every year).
This video explains the concept of preprints:
Their work is now available to everyone free of charge – an act of defiance that prodigy Aaron Swartz could get behind; he was charged for copying hundreds of thousands of articles from academic journals, so that everyone could read them unrestricted. He apparently then committed suicide.
Researchers avoid publishing preprints because they were afraid that it would affect their career prospects – a valid fear, as some journals refuse to publish research that has been preprinted.
These scientists have chosen to buck the trend and embrace risk because it is simply taking too long to have their research reviewed. For critical issues that demand fast implementation, such as perhaps an impending disease, a long wait for publication is simply unacceptable. They also believe that their research should be read free by the people who often funded it – us, the taxpayers.
There is still a legitimate reason for peer-review, in that research needs to eventually be verified for accuracy and authenticity; a charge that the medical journals have levied.
“Post-publication review of public-health research, what could possibly go wrong?” wrote Elsevier journal publisher, Andrew Miller.
However bioRxiv points out that many of its papers have information that “has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community.”
Also, its should be noted that journals get it wrong too. A paper, which was “authored” by two Simpsons characters and a “Kim Jong Fun,” consisting entirely of pseudo-scientific randomly-generated gibberish, was accepted by not one, but two journals. Other esteemed publications include the likes of “Cuckoo for Coco [sic] Puffs” and “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List.”
Even “legitimate” journals have been caught faking peer-review: an Elsevier journal published one such random-gibberish article. One major journal even admitted as much.
These rebellious biologists are hardly looking to replace peer-review though. “The goal is to improve choice of communication, not to take choices away,” they wrote to the ASAPbio committee. More options is exactly what people deserve, to keep the establishment on its toes, if nothing else.
Sources: New York Times, Science Alert, The New Statesman, Nature, VOX, Slate
This article (The Rogue Biologists who used the Internet to Bypass Peer Review) is a free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
