Re: ChatGPT contributing to current science papers

On 8/11/2024 8:09 PM, JTEM wrote:

  RonO wrote:
 

Peer review has it's flaws, but there is absolutely no doubt that it is the best means we have for giving research it's first pass evaluation.

 It's irredeemably flawed. There needs to be transparency.
 The biggest danger, and it does happen, is good science being killed
off by "Peer Review."

You are just delusional.  There are so many journals publishing similar science that peer review is about the last thing that is going to kill off good science.  The current situation is that there are journals damaging the integrity of the science by being paper mills, and publishing junk if the authors are willing to pay them.

 How to stop it?  Transparency. Let the rejected papers see the light
of day.

When I review a paper, I always check the box that gives the journal the right to name me as one of the reviewers, and to forward my reviews to other journals if they think that the paper would be better suited to those journals, when journals have that policy.  My recollection is that pretty much all journals warn reviewers about reviewing papers where they have a conflict of interest, and pretty much all of them have the reviewers claim no conflict.
There really are so many journals at this time, that the suppression that you claim, just doesn't exist.
Bad junk gets rejected from all legitimate journals.

 

Peer review can be manipulated (Sternberg and Meyer), and groups of researchers have been exposed for recommending each others papers for peer review (some journals ask the authors to recommend possible peer reviewers in their field).

 Less concerned about bad science making it through. Science is self
correcting. Science is repeatable or it isn't science. We can
reasonably expect garbage to self correct. But the opposite isn't
true. Good science that is kept from seeing the light of day is a
loss to the world.

Science is not narrowly focused, and quite dispersed with many journals publishing similar science.  The fact that science is self correcting is the reason that you don't have to worry about peer review.  Things that aren't worth publishing get published all the time.  They just get buried in the junk pile, and do not get noticed.  My guess is that the rate of rejection is pretty low for most journals.  I was an associate editor for around a decade (off and on) since the 1990's, and have reviewed papers from a wide range of journals, and not just that one, and I have only outright rejected 2 papers, all the rest were sent back for revision, and most were eventually accepted.
Ron Okimoto