Article: Stop the deluge of science research. The increasing pace of human discovery is a curse – we need to rethink what it means to publish the results of research

The Guardian is a UK newspaper with a hard-left viewpoint. Generally, they do "science" well. That is, their reporting is well-written, balanced, and clear on scientific breakthroughs, controversies, etc. I read their work on global warming/climate change knowing that they will be thoroughly in the "climate change" camp.

On the other hand, some of their opinion pieces are hilarious examples of whingeing (for Americans, that's whining), special interest pleading, misinformation peddling, inadequate research, and other specimens of lunacy. I have talked about two of the previously. This is not real goofy, but it has its moments.

For a start, not every publication is equal. When the author Theodore Sturgeon first invoked his famous law ("90% of everything is crap") he was talking about science fiction, but he could equally well have been talking about science. Estimates vary wildly, but probably between a quarter and a third of all research papers in the natural sciences go uncited. A much larger proportion is cited only by their own authors or by one or two others.

I, and many of my fellow MS students, had to "publish" our masters' research. Most of us also published at least the abstract to our master's degree research paper in another publication. Many science publications will publish the "proceedings" of a large-scale science meeting (we took over the Virginia Tech campus for a week one summer). The issue is filled with short summaries (or "abstracts") of all the papers presented, even if the "presentation" is one poster board in a room of them.

[And I hope, to God, mine is never cited.]

But, so what? Why is this a problem?

People have to start somewhere. And part of the purpose of publishing is to let people know what has been done.

How does anyone know which publication is a piece of "crap" beforehand? Or even for years afterwards? Gregor Mendel's foundational work on genetics was "lost" for over 20 years. Up until the moment someone recognized its worth, it was "a piece of crap." Nobel Prize winner, Barbara McClintock, was ignored for over 30 years before her work was recognized.

In general I am a supporter of open access, but subscription business models at least help to concentrate the minds of publishers on the poor souls trying to keep up with their journals.

This is a classic gatekeeper problem. The author supposes, or fantasizes, that an all-knowing gatekeeper will be able to weed out the useless and find the diamonds. There is a similar problem going on in science fiction right now. The SF gatekeepers are despairing that SF is a dying genre, while those who publishing independently are finding readers, and, for some, success. (As a side note, one of the largest boosters of SF gatekeeping publishes with the Guardian.)

As if this were not enough, proponents of open science (including me) are proposing that researchers should start publishing all of their work – complete with full data sets, comprehensive methods, negative results and "failed" experiments.

Agreed.

The only practical solution is to take a more differentiated approach to publishing the results of research. On one hand funders and employers should encourage scientists to issue smaller numbers of more significant research papers. This could be achieved by placing even greater emphasis on the impact of a researcher's very best work and less on their aggregate activity.

"Significant;" but again, who determines this?

...Less significant work should be a issued in a form that is simple, standardised and easy for computers to index, retrieve, merge and analyse. Humans would interact with them only when looking for aggregated information on very specific topics.

What would such a publication look like? I don't know exactly, but we can see signs in born-digital data publishing platforms...

I worked for a "biological information service" in the 1970's and 80's. We read abstracts and indexed the articles. Our work was both published in a bound form and also was digitized and available for computer retrieval even in that early and benighted period.

The gates have fallen and the gatekeepers are panicking.

Article: When science gets it wrong: Let the light shine in

The article is about two recent discoveries that have been questioned: one about pluripotent stem cells that has since been withdrawn and the other one about a possible discovery of gravity waves in background radiation.

The title is wrong. The scientists may have gotten it wrong, but science got it right. Science was doing what it should be doing: making data and methods transparent and opening up the research to criticism. As the article highlights, "peer review" cannot catch all the problems. Only by attempting to duplicate the results by others can the authors' research be confirmed and science add to its considerable edifice of knowledge.

However, the real issue here is that the gates have fallen and the gatekeepers are panicking. With the advent of computers and the internet, everything the scientist does can be posted, and reviewed, by anyone. The gates are down. It is scary for people who are used to talking to like-minded researchers to have some "outsider" critique their research, methods, data, and conclusions.  Even their hypotheses might be subject to questioning. Generally, groups of scientists operate inside the paradigms of their individual fields.  Given the correct circumstances, and if you want to be insulting, you could call it group-think or a clique.

The subtext of the article (and openly discussed in the comments) is the global warming hypothesis. Top tier researchers like Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University, James Hanson formerly the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and well-known climatologist, and the researchers at the University of East Anglia in the UK have routinely "adjusted" their raw data. [That is, in the case of the latter two, the actual temperature measurements made at actual weather stations around the world havr been adjusted. Reasons have never been given, nor methodology.] They have then refused to, or been unable to, release their raw data. They have also refused to release the computer models used to analyze the adjusted data. Data and/or methods that have been released have been analyzed and numerous issues have been found [see the Watts Up With That and Climate Audit websites].

The lack of transparency is telling. If their conclusions were actually justified by their research, they would be trumpeting their data and methods rather than hiding them.

The problem with the "top tier" is that they are trying to portray themselves both as dispassionate scientists going wherever their research leads and to be the gatekeepers to that research. They can no longer be both; and they are panicking.

Oddly enough, the same thing is happening in publishing and the current "panic" is being called "Amazon vs Hachette." The real issue is that traditional publishing (represented here by Hachette) is losing their gatekeeping function to the internet in general, and to Amazon.com and other forms of independent publishing in particular. Authors can now avoid the group-think of the big publishing houses and find success via other avenues. The publishing industry and their supporters are often on the left (follow this link and then follow some of the links on that site). The new authors are often on the right. This is a particularly pungent example.

In both cases, the gates have fallen and the gatekeepers are panicking.

UPDATE: More on gatekeeper panic: Mad Duck Publishing