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Levitt on peer review July 31, 2007

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Over at Freakonomics* Steven Levitt has a post up about the peer review process and a change in the editorship** at an economics journal. While I applaud Preston McAfee’s approach, I still think that online publishing could streamline the process even more and make a larger impact on how peer review is conducted and what it means for the reviewer and the reviewee***.

* I always wonder how one should handle a blog title. Italics? Quotation marks? I think I’ll go with italics from here on out.
** Is that a word?
*** Now I’m really out on a limb…

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weekly photo #41: Elfreth’s July 27, 2007

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Elfreth's
This week’s photo is “Elfreth’s”. Elfreth’s Alley is billed as “the nation’s oldest street” — it’s a National Historic Landmark with homes built between 1702 and 1836. Almost all of the homes on the street (which is still accessible to auto traffic) are private homes (there is a museum); the residents keep the outward facades as close to the historic original as they can.So, if you’re in Philly and you’ve seen the big sights, you might want to swing on over to the alley and check it out.

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implicit assumptions July 25, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : economics , add a comment

There are a couple of things economics addresses (or perhaps doesn’t really address) which I find interesting to think about.

One of them, included in the ‘theory of the firm‘, is that businesses exist to maximize profits. I think that this is a fairly interesting assumption. Are we certain that businesses exist to maximize profits (I’m not including non-profit organizations in this)? I’m not so certain of that — don’t some businesses exist for other reasons, perhaps to change the way a certain facet of our lives is led? Or to meet non-financial goals of the owner? Moreover, this assumption is connected to another, implicit part of economics as it seems to be usually practiced: that the ‘business sphere’ is somehow separate from other ’spheres’ of our lives. Certainly any given person doesn’t undergo some sort of magical priority shift when they arrive at work, or start a business, or quit a private sector job to go work for the government — and yet, we seem to think that the Government has a different set of priorities than Business; and that a Worker has different priorities than a Capitalist or a Stay at Home Parent (to say nothing of the implication that the Proletariat has different priorities than the Bourgeoisie). Why is that?

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open access and peer review July 24, 2007

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So, for the big project, I’ve been thinking a bit about online publishing and peer review. I’m an outsider here; the closest I’ve ever come to peer review is having classmates look at work or looking at their work.

So, I’m more than happy to take input from those who do or are ’subjected to’ peer review, and am hoping for any glaring and amateur errors to be pointed out.

One of the things I’ve thought about is the fact that peer review is essentially unrewarded. It’s part and parcel of the job of doing active research, but in the end, an individual is not rewarded for doing it, let alone rewarded for doing it well. In short, there’s no real incentive for being a good peer-reviewer. There’s also the difficulties connected with submitting work and having it reviewed, as the process is (as I understand it) dependent on the editor(s) of the journal concerned: will the editor pick good reviewers? Will they want to do it? Will their reviews be timely? And so on.

And then there’s the aspect of the journals themselves: sure, there’s the OA aspect of them charging large sums for publishing scientific work — but there’s also the “branding aspect“. Does Nature only publish ‘important’ papers, or do papers published in Nature become more important simply by virtue of being in that journal?

Open Access can have a huge impact on this — and not just on disseminating research to those interested on a much broader level. Not only on reducing the huge fees and thus increasing the limited availability of research to libraries. Not only can sites like PLoS, PubMed, DoAR, DoAJ, and all the others put more research out more quickly to more people.

They could change peer review, as well. PLoS ONE has taken a big first step with the ability to rate papers. What about making peer review itself a more transparent, online, open access process? Looking at sites like Wikipedia and EBay, I hit upon the idea, which I readily admit is still very underdeveloped, of having peer review take place in an entirely different manner. Rating papers is, as I said, a big first step. And perhaps the community (which, again, I’m not really a part of) isn’t ready to leap headfirst into something like what I’m thinking about.

But it’s still interesting, to me, to think about having peer review occur online, with feedback. Anonymity can be preserved, the ability to post reviews should be (obviously) more restricted than Wikipedia’s no holds barred approach, but the concept of a ‘talk page‘ or something similar coupled with a feedback system could, in my mind, do two things:

1. Enable peer review to become faster, with more input in the form of a dialogue

2. Enable a system which can provide feedback and recognition of the reviewer — an incentive and a reward for what is at this point an absolutely integral but also mostly unrewarded part of research publication.

This is a preliminary post, a sort of collecting-of-thoughts. Any ideas? I’m more than happy to have some peer review going on here.

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weekly photo #40: Deeping July 18, 2007

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Deeping
This photo, “Deeping”, seemed fitting to me, since it’s of a pair of pines which are situated not too far from the dam. I’ve always loved these trees, even though climbing in them tended to get my hands and knees coated in sap.

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we are not alone July 17, 2007

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So, trying to change the world when starting from scratch isn’t easy. I’ll be trying (emphasis on trying, since I’m working on a lot else it seems now) to delve a little deeper into the Public Library of Science, and see if perhaps I can… not so much stand on some giants’ shoulders as maybe keep my options open and try to become one myself.

After all, Coturnix is working for them. More importantly, an idea that I had and another idea (prompted thanks to some insights from a good friend) are, well, already somewhat in practice at PLoS: online open access publishing of peer reviewed papers and the ability to ‘rate’ papers. Which is very similar to the idea I had… close, but not quite. Well, we’ll have to see where it goes, eh? At any rate, I’m gainfully employed for at least another 28 months. But who’s counting?

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lafferable July 14, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : economics , add a comment

If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and check out Mark CC at Good Math, Bad Math destroying the WSJ editorial section’s pathetic attempt to make the data match their prejudices in graphic form.

Also: PZ’s got a post up on it which includes a graph of what the curve should look like.

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weekly photo #39: Upper Lake Fall July 14, 2007

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Upper Lake Fall
This week’s photo is another from a place near and dear to me — Promised Land State Park, in northeast Pennsylvania. My father has a cabin up in Promised Land that was acquired via somewhat circuitous channels; it was a hunting cabin that was often used by my maternal grandfather and eventually went up for sheriff’s sale. We would go up there every summer (and sometimes in the winter); I spent lots of time wandering around in the forests of the Poconos and always looked forward to getting away for a bit.The photo is of the dam at the upper lake (both lakes, named Promised Land Lake and Lower Lake, are man-made), and is called “Upper Lake Fall”.

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irksome July 13, 2007

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Jay- “…People are smart, they can handle it.”
Kay- “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

That’s from the film Men In Black, which is a very unlikely source for one of my favorite quotes. It’s also the source of something I find irksome; which I also witnessed when I took the kids to see Transformers last weekend.

In both films, characters are introduced to a secret compound where the Feds have access to alien technology. MIB’s compound is somewhat more ‘friendly’ than is the version in Transformers. However, in both films the characters are told that the aliens’ technology is the source of much of our own modern tech.

Now, I know I’m being curmudgeonly, but it’s still irksome. It’s also, I think, indicative of a tendency people have to somehow discount the achievements of the last half-century or so. Or, at least, a tendency to not understand them, perhaps even fear them.

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