More Peer Review Excitement

July 2, 2021

Academics, researchers, and “experts” love the glory of ink in a peer reviewed publication. Hey, if you want tenure or a juicy grant, those “prestigious” journals and the peer review process is an Olympic medal of sorts.

“Scientists Quit Journal Board, Protesting Grossly Irresponsible Study Claiming COVID-19 Vaccines Kill” summarizes allegedly uncomfortable information about Covid related research report appearing in Vaccines, an open source journal. Another sci-tech outfit, Science Magazine (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science) revealed what could be slick propaganda or search engine optimization of the peer review process itself.

In short, the original article made some experts uncomfortable. How uncomfortable? AAAS Science Magazine says:

Six “experts” quit because a peer reviewed article appearing in Vaccine was incorrect.
The Vaccine article appeared to have misused of data. (Yeah, I know that rarely happens.)
The researchers who wrote the Vaccine article made flawed assumptions. (Another black swan for sure.)
“Experts” writing a peer reviewed article Vaccine were experts, just not in the Covid disciplines. (Is anyone listed in LinkedIn culpable of claiming expertise in a technical field whilst knowing little about that discipline? Of course not.)

If the AAAS Science Magazine write up about the Vaccine article is accurate, more than 300,000 Internet users (either human or bot) clicked on the Covid story. Eyeballs. Fame. Controversy.

I mention peer review dust up because if the Vaccine Covid centric research article is indexed, placed in a commercial online database, and sold at $30 a download, we may have identified one of the reasons Sci-Hub has become popular.

Observations/Hypotheses:

Peer reviewed articles can be darned exciting, wrong, and/or guided by non scientific forces.
Professional associations like the AAAS are mounting up like Don Quixote and charging at already constructed, reinforced, and operating windmills. Ineffectual? I think so.
Individual “experts” are “into” some interesting types of information management activities.
Online vendors who want to sell documents as super valuable even though the information is fabricated from recycled plastic Mountain Dew bottles.

This professional publishing and peer reviewing are more exciting than I thought possible.

Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2021

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, News, Publishing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.