Smurfy Peer Review

Resolved: I am going to start taking inspiration from The Smurfs when I write referee reports for articles that particularly annoy me.

To wit:

"Where did the authors smurf up this idea?"

"This figure is smurfed."

"The authors might want to consider smurfing the abstract a little bit more."

Update: I know; I know: this isn't very smurfy of me.

Update 2: "A total smurf job."

'Proof by Borges'

Pro Tip: 'Proof by Borges' also works for reviewing papers and grant proposals.

(These reviews are basically book reports anyway.)

Spotting Fake Peer Reviews

This article has a rather juicy line: “When a lot of the fake peer reviews first came up, one of the reasons the editors spotted them was that the reviewers responded on time,” Wager told Ars.

LOL!

(Tip of the cap to Craig Montuori.)

Peer Review in Pictures

Yes and Hell Yes!

That's really how it works.

Will There Be a Mass Editorial Resignation at Scientific Reports?

Will There Be a Mass Editorial Resignation at Scientific Reports?

There might be.

(And a "Way to go!" and a "Huzzah!" to my colleagues from the complex-systems community for taking this action!)

Financial Resources and Publishing in Scientific Reports?

As some of you know, I am not exactly the biggest fan of the journal Scientific Reports, which is brought to us by the Nature Publishing Group.

I won't get into my specific grievances here, though the journal now appears to have hit a new low with their pay-to-play peer-review activities (e.g., with authors allowed to pay for a fast-track peer review that uses a different and third party peer-review service rather than normal peer review). As discussed here and here, one editor has already resigned. Good! I hope many other Scientific Reports editors follow suit, and some of my peeps from the complex-systems community are also fighting back: they have sent a letter to the Powers That Be at Scientific Reports. I am sharing this letter with permission.

I hope more editors from Scientific Reports resign and that that forces them to either go under or, better yet, to change to have more reasonable policies on such things. (Ideally, they would also improve other epically bad aspects of their venue, but that is a story for another day.)

"Peer Review Ring" Busted

A "peer review ring" (kind of like a prostitution ring, except with more scientists) at Journal of Vibration and Control has been busted. The situation is described in this article, and you can find more information about this peer-review scandal in this article.

The now-former Editor in Chief of JVC is Ali Nayfeh, who has written some very nice books on nonlinear vibrations. (I have one of his books. There is some really good stuff in there.) He has apparently "retired" as EiC, though my expectation is that it is a combination of genuine retirement and embarrassment that this scandal took place on his watch.

The choice quote comes from Retraction Watch, who started their report in the busting of the peer-review ring with "This one deserves a 'wow.'"

(Tip of the cap to Jennifer Nicoll Victor.)

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review"

The magazine Science conducted a fascinating experiment on peer review in open-access journals. They were able to get a bogus paper accepted (often without peer review and even more often without rigorous peer review) more often than not. Interestingly, they did not comment on whether or not they got the IRB approval that is necessary for studies that involve human subjects. (IRB is "Internal Review Board" and is a board for US-based studies. Other countries have analogous bodies.) As discussed in the first link, although this experiment was done with open-access journals, I'm sure one would find the same crap in journals that are published using more conventional pricing models.

(Tip of the cap to someone named Gary King, who appears to be a professor at Harvard University. I found this article via a Facebook link on which my collaborator James Fowler wrote a comment.)

Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945

Miguel included this link in his comment on a previous post, and I think that this video about scientific peer review (circa 1945) is hilarious, so I wanted to give it the post it deserves. Very nice!