Almost all scientific papers are peer-reviewed. This means (typically) that between one and three researchers from the same field as the paper’s topic offer (sometimes constructive) criticism and a judgement as to whether or not the paper merits publication. There is a strange ritual to it, whereby the authors submit, the reviewers critique, then the authors rebut or acquiesce to the reviewers’ demands, while the editor acts as ringmaster and makes the final decision. The main problems are that (i) there is a lack of dialogue (you only get a very small number of opportunities to engage), and (ii) your manuscript is in the hands of a very small number of reviewers with their own particular foibles and hobby horses.
A solution to this is to have either (i) open pre-publication peer-review, or (ii) open post-publication peer-review. This means that the paper is discussed by more people and in a medium which encourages dialogue, such as a blog comments section. Even better, each element of the dialogue can feature as a subsection of the paper itself, making each section citable in its own right. This encourages reviewers and commenters alike to produce high-quality criticisms and has been implemented in some journals. Here’s an example of the process in action in a particularly controversial climate paper at Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics:
This is certainly the way forward for open science.
Since I’m “young” (whatever that means) I sometimes get asked to advise on how to disseminate research outputs through new-fangled doohickies like “the social media” (like writing click-baity headlines). This came up in a School Management Group meeting today, in the context of trying to increase visibility and citation rates for papers published by our faculty. It was something that I was quite interested in, so I spent about an hour doing some quick literature searches and then implementing some of what I found. Here’s the gist:
Background: It is thought that all animals age: they show an increased probability of death at greater ages. However, the lifespans of many animals vary widely. What is it that determines whether or not an animal lives for one year or one hundred years? One of the key drivers is thought to be how likely you are to be killed by something else. Those animals that that are unlikely to be eaten, whether that is because they are very large (elephants), well armoured (tortoises) or poisonous (poison dart frogs), tend to evolve lower rates of ageing. After all, if you are going to live for a long time anyway, you might as well make the most of it. On the other hand, if you live precariously from day to day then there isn’t much point in investing later in life because you probably won’t get that far.
Katatrepsis 