By: Lawrence B. Conyers
below is an addendum to my first little post on the purpose of this open access site
There Is A Coming Crisis In Peer Reviewed Publications In Our Field
There is a coming crisis with peer reviewed publications in our field. The symptoms have been apparent for about 6 or 7 years and are now becoming obvious. Those of us who came from the academic realm have always relied on well-established publications to “show our worth” and achievements necessary for promotion and tenure decisions.…
4 responses to “There Is A Coming Crisis In Peer Reviewed Publications In Our Field”
-
Hi everyone. Larry here. I am writing this comment in the hope that I can get others to make comments after looking at this, and other articles here. So far there has been limited numbers of people who feel like they want or can comment. I know subscribers have been reading the articles, as I can track the downloads (not actual reads) and there have been more than 80 on the Laetoli article, and in the 20s or 30s for the other articles. I am not sure why there is a lack of comments. Perhaps people are just more familiar with doing “thumbs up” or “likes” on social media? Will you please make even a short comment about the articles after you have read them? And perhaps we can get a different kind of a discussion going, which is different than with most articles that I or you have published, which just go into a “black hole”. Thanks.
-
Hello,
Is there an alternative system for publishing the site reports where you’ve just found something? With out the pressure of having to prove it was impactful and revolutionary. It’s quite nice when you’re planning a survey just to know what’s been done in the area and what sorts of things you’re likely to find or not find especially if there’s been some excavation and ground proofing later.
It’s vitally important for bioarchaeologists to have regional databases and reference collections to compare their isotope values or what ever else to, and excavating archaeologists need to justify the inherently destructive process of digging with some worth while research aims, but with non intrusive surveys it seems like beyond the headline snap shots in figures the data just disappears into an archive somewhere with out any incentive to broadcast it.
I guess the question is what to do with data (masters thesis’s come to mind) that’s arn’t significant enough for a major publication on their own but might be useful to someone down the line if only they could find it
-
Thanks MIchael. My vision for this site it to publish all kind of “good” results, no matter whhat the work was done for. We will still need to have it reviewed by the board, but we are NOT going to play the games that the big-shot peer-reviewed publications play. But I will remind you that just “finding something” is not enough to make a paper. We got over that about 25 years ago. Now you need to actually say something interesting with your results. It could be a new processing technique. Or your results have led to a change in ideas about history, or culture or something. I spent almost 20 yearss as co-editor of Arch. Prospection, and made many enemies by demanding that authors say something interesting! It was like pulling teeth to get, especially the Europeans” to conclude! So with that said, take your results, make them into a 10-15 page article, and conclude. Then send it my way and we will review it. This should be MUCH easier than the more formal process for peer-reviewed publications.
-
-
Hi Larry,
I applaud your efforts and two thoughts come to mind that I wanted to share.
1. Notwithstanding the perfectly valid criticisms that you have made of the publishing industry, the process of strict and rigorous peer review is critical in both the scientific method and in maintaining scientific credibility. We are experiencing an era of profound science denial in which some guy on X’s opinion is thought to carry as much weight as the most learned authority on any subject. Given that, any threat to the rigor of the vetting of scientific review process needs to be avoided. I’m reminded of the recent results that Lee Berger has published concerning Homo naledi in eLife. I would really like some of these results to be validated, but the fact that Berger published them in an unrefereed journal has already cast doubt on them. The bottom line is that I think your efforts need to include and clarify a rigorous peer review process.
2. I have always thought the idea of a Journal of Negative Results would be a great idea. How much time could be saved by knowing that someone tried something, using rigorous, well designed experiments and found out it didn’t work! I would encourage publishing results of stuff that doesn’t work.Best
Alex
Leave a Reply to Michael Murray Cancel reply