Mastodawn

Mike Taylor 🦕

"#Preprints have moved the field to a new model where each work will stand on its own merits rather than the prestige provided by the journal where it is published."

This is a really important observation that I'd not really grasped until it was spelled out here.

To me, this is a strong argument for abolishing (or abandoning) ALL journals.

@mike

While I get that point, I can't see non-famous people getting reviewers without a journal editor to recruit them. And I do think there's value in reviewer comments, especially if those comments are public.

@sharoz I don't disagree with any of that (although we did OK with comments on our Qeios paper, https://www.qeios.com/read/1G6J3Q.5 ) but I am not convinced the positive value in what we do now outweighs the negatibe.

Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs so variable?

The vertebrae of sauropod dinosaurs have distinctive and complex pneumatic features including fossae and foramina in the sides of their centra. These vary between individuals, serially within individuals, and even between the left and right sides of...

@mike My ideal is to replace journals with overlay journals that have a peer review recruitment mechanism.

1. Post preprint.
2. For credibility, submit to overlay journal to request peer review.
3. Editor recruits reviewers and goes through standard process.
4. Revisions are made on the preprint as necessary.
5. Journal shares link to preprint along with reviews as commentary preprints.
6. Preprint server includes links to journal reviews.

No need for copyright transfer.

@sharoz That is certainly better than what we have now.

But I am toying with the idea that even overlay journals should not exist — because lazy administrators WILL use them as a proxy for quality.

@mike I get that. I'm worried that the alternative, endorsements or citation counts will be used as a proxy. I wonder if it's just an issue of the lesser of two evils.

@sharoz It definitely is a matter of finding the less of (more than) two evils. Whatever we do, administrators will search for short-cuts. The best we can is (A) make it hard for them to do so, (B) make it that the proxies they do eventually use as less bad than the ones we have.

@mike
100% agreed.

@sharoz BTW., sometime the lazy administrators are us, and that *really* worries me. I remember talking to a palaeontologist who I like and respect, who told me they had so many people applying for a role that had opened up in their department, they were having to do the initial screening on whether the candidate had a Science or Nature paper. I can hard begin to list all the things that are wrong with that.

@mike Same goes for when you need to cite work outside your specific expertise. The further from our expertise, the more likely we are to rely on questionable quality metrics because we don't have much else to go by.

@sharoz That aspect I am less worried about. I tend to find such things by recommendation of people who I trust in fields more adjacent to mine.

Johann-Mattis List Jan 17, 2023

@mike

I think that there is still something that can be won from the peer review process, and quite a few papers that I have published have profited from peer review, and I also believe that I could help other papers as a reviewer. In this context, I like the strategy of the European Research Council in funding their own funder's journal "Open Research Europe". They have open review, they provide good typesetting even for preprints, and they are open access.

https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/