Article by Stuart Ritchie: “But although the internet has transformed the way we read it, the overall system for how we publish science remains largely unchanged. We still have scientific papers; we still send them off to peer reviewers; we still have editors who give the ultimate thumbs up or down as to whether a paper is published in their journal.
This system comes with big problems. Chief among them is the issue of publication bias: reviewers and editors are more likely to give a scientific paper a good write-up and publish it in their journal if it reports positive or exciting results. So scientists go to great lengths to hype up their studies, lean on their analyses so they produce “better” results, and sometimes even commit fraud in order to impress those all-important gatekeepers. This drastically distorts our view of what really went on.
There are some possible fixes that change the way journals work. Maybe the decision to publish could be made based only on the methodology of a study, rather than on its results (this is already happening to a modest extent in a few journals). Maybe scientists could just publish all their research by default, and journals would curate, rather than decide, which results get out into the world. But maybe we could go a step further, and get rid of scientific papers altogether.
Scientists are obsessed with papers – specifically, with having more papers published under their name, extending the crucial “publications” section of their CV. So it might sound outrageous to suggest we could do without them. But that obsession is the problem. Paradoxically, the sacred status of a published, peer-reviewed paper makes it harder to get the contents of those papers right.
Consider the messy reality of scientific research. Studies almost always throw up weird, unexpected numbers that complicate any simple interpretation. But a traditional paper – word count and all – pretty well forces you to dumb things down. If what you’re working towards is a big, milestone goal of a published paper, the temptation is ever-present to file away a few of the jagged edges of your results, to help “tell a better story”. Many scientists admit, in surveys, to doing just that – making their results into unambiguous, attractive-looking papers, but distorting the science along the way.
And consider corrections. We know that scientific papers regularly contain errors. One algorithm that ran through thousands of psychology papers found that, at worst, more than 50% had one specific statistical error, and more than 15% had an error serious enough to overturn the results. With papers, correcting this kind of mistake is a slog: you have to write in to the journal, get the attention of the busy editor, and get them to issue a new, short paper that formally details the correction. Many scientists who request corrections find themselves stonewalled or otherwise ignored by journals. Imagine the number of errors that litter the scientific literature that haven’t been corrected because to do so is just too much hassle.
Finally, consider data. Back in the day, sharing the raw data that formed the basis of a paper with that paper’s readers was more or less impossible. Now it can be done in a few clicks, by uploading the data to an open repository. And yet, we act as if we live in the world of yesteryear: papers still hardly ever have the data attached, preventing reviewers and readers from seeing the full picture.
The solution to all these problems is the same as the answer to “How do I organise my journals if I don’t use cornflakes boxes?” Use the internet. We can change papers into mini-websites (sometimes called “notebooks”) that openly report the results of a given study. Not only does this give everyone a view of the full process from data to analysis to write-up – the dataset would be appended to the website along with all the statistical code used to analyse it, and anyone could reproduce the full analysis and check they get the same numbers – but any corrections could be made swiftly and efficiently, with the date and time of all updates publicly logged…(More)”.
