Bias
Bias in the Peer-Review Buddy System?
19/11/10 03:00 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Ewen Callaway in Nature's The Great Beyond critiqued a PLoS One paper in which researchers analyze whether open peer review systems discourage biases, such as those that often surface when authors request specific reviewers for their manuscripts (e.g. "on papers where there was disagreement among ... reviewers, those recommended by the author were more likely to provide favorable feedback and accept a paper than the editor-recommended reviewer."). S. Pelech notes that at the end of the day, it is really up the to general scientific community to accept or disregard the validity of the data and conclusions in a paper, and advocates that peer-review should not be completely anonymous. Read More...
Oh, the Vanity
03/05/10 12:39 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Apparently authors with connections to industry are more than twice as likely to pay open access fees to make their work free — a bias that some think could lead to preferential publishing and reading of pro-industry results. S. Pelech argues that even with the traditional journal subscription model, there has alway been an "author-pays' element to scientific publishing in most cases and academic authors are just as inclined to publish "favorable work" as industrial authors, because they are subjected to even more pressure to publish or perish that those in industry. Ultimately, a scientific manuscript stil has to pass independent, scrutiny from peer-review before it is published. Read More...