UKC

A grand short tale, from the Grauniad, of a biologist who's hobby is finding errors in scientific papers.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/29/sholto-david-biologist-find...

How to make yourself unpopular...

...doing the job journal editors and reviewers should do!

But don’t get paid for.

we do, but also rely on PubPeer for example, which picks up on repeat offenders. We also apply plagiarism software, software to detect the software which hides the plagiarism, and now ChatGPT detection. stuff inevitably gets through occasionally but you should see the mountains of stuff that gets rejected, we fight a rear guard action agains paper mills and consortia. Reviewers do a great job for free. TBH I’ve been heading up a journal for more than 10 years and it’s never been so challenging.

I assume your errors were intentional? 

Irrespective of most reviewers being honest, hardworking, underpaid and under-valued it would be good if such detective work was welcomed, given how important reproducible results are in STEM research. It would also be nice if serial offenders faced some penalty greater than rejection.

I have to agree with all your points. There have always been problems, but the scale of the problem since the move towards OA publishing is mind boggling. The publishers make £5M net out of my journal per year, and its a difficult balancing act to fight off the interests of profit. On the other hand, I get regular emails from another publisher of a behind-the-paywall journal that for that journal, our reject ratio isn't high enough to maintain our impact factor and we need to come down hard!