#academia became a turd that you can't flush down the toilet and keeps farting toxic gasses all over the place. Worst still, "we" keep playing the game, pretending that everything is fine and cheerily announcing another publication in a meaningless rat race of factors.
@IanSudbery@GhostOnTheHalfShell@Mencjusz@academicchatter When thinking about change, should we focus on what researchers would like or on what structures are most successful and efficient at producing results? I suspect those two will come into opposition at some point. (1/4)
You'll be working with another reviewer to read and run the code, make sure it fills a basic checklist which usually only takes a few hours, and beyond that whatever youd like to focus on. Both of these are collaborative review processes where the goal is to help these packages be usable, well documented, and maintainable for the overall health of free scientific software.
Its fun, I promise! Happy to answer questions and boosts welcome.
One thing that sucks about #PeerReview being so broken and a vector of domination rather that cooperation is that, in the best case, they can be skillshares as much as anything else. In some code reviews I have given and received, I have taught and learned how to do things that I or the other person wished they knew how to do, but didnt.
That literally cant happen in the traditional model of review, where reviews are strict, terse, and noninteractive. Traditional review also happens way too late, when all the projected work is done. Collaborative, open, early review literally inverts the dreaded "damn reviewers want us to do infinity more experiments" dynamic. Instead, wouldnt it be lovely if during or even before you do an experiment, having a designated person to be like "hey have you thought about doing it this way? If not i can show you how"
The adversarial system forces you into a position where you have to defend your approach as The Correct One and any change in your Genius Tier experimental design must be only to validate the basic findings of the original design. Reviewers cannot be considered as collaborators, and thus have little incentive to review with any other spirit than "gatekeeper of science."
If instead we adopted some lessons from open source and thought of some parts of reviews as "pull requests" - where fixing a bug is somewhat the responsibility of the person who thinks it should be done differently, but then they also get credit for that work in the same way that the original authors do, we could
a) share techniques and knowledge between labs in a more systematic way,
b) have better outcomes from moving beyond the sole genius model of science,
c) avoid a ton of experimental waste from either unnecessary extra experiments or improperly done original experiments,
d) build a system of reviewing that actually rewards reviewers for being collegial and cooperative
edit: to be super clear here i know i am not saying anything new, just reflecting on it as i am doing an open review
Looks like a good bit of fun (cellular automata are a recurring love of mine) - we would love to give people who haven't had a chance to review software a go here, but previous reviewers welcome too. You'll be taking on the role of a prospective user and colleague advising and trying to help make a package work as well as it can, reaching some minimum standard via checklist, raising issues and making suggestions as you read and run it.
Did anyone of you already receive #peerreview that was obviously created by #LLM? I can see how #predatorypublishers speed up their publication cycles, get rid of costly human interactions and deliver some seemingly plausible text to authors by just throwing manuscripts at a LLM and then let it generate reviews.
@hauschke@academicchatter if that’s the best a publisher can do, then there’s zero value in publishers anymore. might as well make a fully open source open science site that does the same thing
So yes, in theory a review, if it were to follow scientific protocol, could be anonymous.
But peer review is exactly not a scientific rebuke/answer to an article. Because that would leave the reader with the recursive problem of having to assess the review.
It's more like a reference in normal work like. A trusted reviewer does the work of assessing the article/proposal/... for us.
Non-anonymous peer review creates a different, and more common, type of conflict of interest!
As a young PI without tenure, I'm reviewing papers by senior people in the field who wield power over my career, because they sit on all the grant and hiring committees, and will review my papers and proposals. If I cause their paper to get rejected from Nature, I do not want my name put next to the review, sorry.
Anyone interested in a $250 stipend for peer reviewing an OER textbook, "Intro to Communication and Media Studies"? It's adapted from several sources and has some original contributions by both me and my students. Due to a federal grant requirement, this is only open to those living in the U.S. I need three reviewers! Happy to answer any questions. #academia#peerreview#OER @academicchatter@academicsunite
@jjsylvia@academicchatter@academicsunite Well I'm no academic and I don't need to get paid; I'd just like to have my name as a reviewer. I currently am Communications Director for the American Institute of Building Design (AIBD.org) and have about 15 experience in digital marketing.
@jjsylvia@academicchatter@academicsunite what's the time commitment? Is there a template or rubric for review or is it open? do they need to have a communications and media background? I don't (linguistics), but years of experience working with English as a second/subsequent language and could provide some feedback on accessibility for that demographic.
First evidence for human occupation of a lava tube in Arabia: The archaeology of Umm Jirsan Cave and its surroundings, northern Saudi Arabia
"The lava tube does not appear to have served as a permanent habitation location, but rather as a site that likely lay on herding routes and that allowed access to shade and water for passing herders and their animals. Prior to this, as well as during pastoral periods, the lava tube was likely also linked with hunting activities, which probably remained a cornerstone of local economies into the Bronze Age."
Stewart M, Andrieux E, Blinkhorn J, Guagnin M, Fernandes R, et al. (2024) First evidence for human occupation of a lava tube in Arabia: The archaeology of Umm Jirsan Cave and its surroundings, northern Saudi Arabia. PLOS ONE 19(4): e0299292. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299292
"The paper proposed aims to analyze the slavery legislation born between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the so-called Black Codes laws—enacted in all the greatest colonial powers of the Old Continent—which regulated life and transportation of slaves in the colonies. Spain, Portugal, England and France, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, created legislative codes dedicated to the slave’s management in the colonies, which regulated all aspects of their life: from religion to marriage, from cohabitation to imprisonment, from crimes to corporal punishment."