Hi, Slevesque.
slevesque writes:
What I'm asking is, is the publishing system mulfunctional, or broken ? And should the recommendations made by Trebino be applied ?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that the system is broken, but there are clearly bugs and kinks in it.
Peer review is a difficult thing to manage. Editors often have to struggle to find people who are willing to do reviews (which can raise concerns about reviewer qualifications), and they have to try to enforce deadlines (which are very frequently not met).
Reviewers and editors can be jerks or softies; they can be wordy or terse; they can be organized or sloppy; they can be more qualified or less qualified; they can be fair or unfair; they may or may not take their responsibilities very seriously, etc.
The proper way to deal with this is to accept that there will always be a human element, and that justice won't always get served the way you want it to. And, even if you're treated unfairly, you can always just go to another journal. You may not get the impact factor or the readership you want, but anybody so absurdly idealistic that they think not getting exactly what they want is a legitimate grounds to bemoan the system is frankly too self-absorbed to get my sympathy.
-----
Here's another example (from ecology). It's possible to detect the DNA of a prey item inside the gut of a predator for a certain window of time after the predator has eaten the prey. So, now ecologists are jumping on the "molecular ecology" bandwagon to rake in all the big grant moneys and get in the news for "cutting-edge" science.
The trouble is that ecologists generally don't spend a lot of time learning the particulars of DNA work, and aren't really trained in the way biochemistry works. So, once somebody decided to try to determine what the window of detection for different types of predators is using laboratory feeding trials, everybody else just picked it up and started doing it.
Now, everybody
has to do detection-window trials, or their papers get rejected; even though the detection windows you can get from laboratory studies are useless for interpretation. So, this is an example of peer review enforcing the retention of a costly and problematic hoop for ecologists to jump through.
Eventually, with all the resistance to it, and the improvement of knowledge over time, ecologists are going to realize this and change it; but, in the meantime, we're all going to waste thousands of dollars on Qiagen kits and thousands of hours force-feeding beetles and spiders in the laboratory.
Nobody ever said science was particularly efficient. But, broken? No, it's not broken: it's just annoying.
-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)
Darwin loves you.
™ Version 4.2
