Nature journal to begin offering double-blind peer review 6 hours ago by Bob Yirka Well known and respected journal, Nature, will begin next month offering researchers who submit their work for peer review, the option of having it done via the double-blind method—whereby both submitters and reviewers names are kept anonymous. In an Announcement piece, the journal explains why it has chosen to take this step and what it hopes to achieve by doing so. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-nature-journal-double-blind-peer.html#jCp
Nature still decides what papers are passed on to the review stage. The work is being pre-judged. If I submitted a paper to Nature tomorrow I would be amazed if it made it to the peer review stage. Now that would probably be a fair outcome, but in principle it means some potentially worthy research is being discriminated against on the basis of criteria that may lack transparency. Perhaps members with more direct experience of the peer review system could comment on this.
One example of bias in publication is, any paper that does not give homosexuality a warm round of applause, will be socially censored due to politics before science. This example is not a value judgement, but rather it is an easy example to use that shows all science is not treated equally. The value of this political trick added to science, is if you can censor part of the science, so it is less represented in the literature, the preponderance of the published studies, can tell the audience what you want them to hear. Relative to this working example (not a moral judgment) anyone even proposing such a politically incorrect study will meet with political resistance way before they can reach the publishing stage. It will hard to get funding, while the open witch hunt will make the neutral minded scientists turn away in their own self defense. The publishing community does not have to be exposed to the politics, directly, but can create the illusions it treats all papers the same. The publication process does remain unbiased in the sense but the result will still be more consistent with the party line. Run a test where you oppose the consensus politics of science and see what happens to the path toward publication. Objective science and objective publishing would attempt to be more balanced in terms of representing all opinions, when there is more that one opinion. This is where funding would be better distributed, by a politics free method, to reflect the diversity of opinions that can conform to the rules of research. Manmade global warming stacks the deck of publication by stacking the deck of funding, while using politics to limit opposing science. The science not published are because they are the deniers even if they follow the rules of science. What is net published, is valid to be published, but the unspoken deception is opposing science is limited. Science is not a rational religion based on seeking truth, which means all stones needed to turned over, even if uncomfortable. It is is closer to big business and the government crony capitalism.
Well, that's a big load of horse shit right there. I'm sure you're unhappy that there aren't papers damning homosexuals and black people. However, reality just has a left-wing bias.
If the reviewers of particular papers remain anonymous, then everyone is left dependent on the editors' assurances that the reviewers they employed were really scholarly peers, that the reviewers didn't have their own agendas and were unbiased regarding the subject of the proposed paper. In the case of Nature, I wouldn't worry about that very much. I have great respect for that publication. But anonymous reviewers might conceivably become a problem when papers on controversial subjects are submitted to lesser journals, in the so-called 'social sciences' and humanities particularly.
Funding competition, business / industrial influences, lack of sustained reproducibility, and these deteriorating publishing aspects are all a growing cancer. Not a good era credibility-wise for disciplines which even graze or have one foot in human interests and border on being as lax as the social sciences. Maybe similar could even be said for the putatively stricter basement of the physical sciences, what with testability being replaced by mathematical support and aesthetics in buttressing and drumming-up favor for this or that theoretical construct. - - - - - - - Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). There simply aren't enough competent people to do the job. The overwhelming effect of the huge (and unpaid) effort that is put into reviewing papers is to maintain a status hierarchy of journals. Any paper, however bad, can now get published in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed. The blame for this sad situation lies with the people who have imposed a publish-or-perish culture, namely research funders and senior people in universities. To have "written" 800 papers is regarded as something to boast about rather than being rather shameful. University PR departments encourage exaggerated claims, and hard-pressed authors go along with them.... --David Colquhoun Study vs. Study: The Decline Effect and Why Scientific 'Truth' So Often Turns Out Wrong [...] A few years ago, I devoted a Who's Counting article to the work of Dr. John Ioannidis, a medical researcher now at Stanford. Ioannidis examined the evidence in 45 well-publicized health studies from major journals appearing between 1990 and 2003. His conclusion: the results of more than one third of these studies were flatly contradicted or significantly weakened by later work. The same general idea is discussed in "The Truth Wears Off," an article by Jonah Lehrer that appeared last month in the New Yorker magazine. Lehrer termed the phenomenon the "decline effect," by which he meant the tendency for replication of scientific results to fail -- that is, for the evidence supporting scientific results to seemingly weaken over time, disappear altogether, or even suggest opposite conclusions. [...] Publication bias is, no doubt, also part of the reason for the decline effect. That is to say that seemingly significant experimental results will be published much more readily than those that suggest no experimental effect or only a small one. People, including journal editors, naturally prefer papers announcing or at least suggesting a dramatic breakthrough to those saying, in effect, "Ehh, nothing much here." The availability error, the tendency to be unduly influenced by results that, for one reason or another, are more psychologically available to us, is another factor...." --John Allen Paulos
