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Evidence is accumulating that quality control is a serious issue in academic publishing, which is the key to career advancement for scientists and other scholars. In an age when appeals to "peer reviewed" "settled science" have become standard operating procedure in efforts to impose radical increases in government control over our lives, corruption in the mechanisms for reviewing  scientific publications has very real consequences for all of us. Nature magazine tells us: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Richard Van Noorden writes: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after...

A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals. See All Special Issue ContentOn 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen. In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand...

When medical research is published in a peer-reviewed journal, the presumption is that the study has been reviewed for accuracy. The advent of open-access journals has made it easier to get published. But when a journalist sent an obviously faked paper, dozens of open-access journals said they'd be happy to publish it, for a fee. That's the conclusion of an elaborate sting carried out by Science, a leading mainline journal. The result should trouble doctors, patients, policymakers and anyone who has a stake in the integrity of science (and who doesn't?). The business model of these "predatory publishers" is a...

Peer-review was meant to be a safeguard against the publication of bad science but the balance is shifting towards open access --snip-- Others are tougher. The Royal Society in London demands full data disclosure from contributors to its Philosophical Transactions. Schneider told the Guardian there might be some middle ground – especially over researchers' highly prized and personally written computer codes. Maybe, like commercial patents, they should be allowed exclusive use of their own codes, as their own intellectual property, for two or three years. That, he said, would be time enough to "publish the initial papers using their hard...

I have been asked to write this review by a party who wishes to remain anonymous because of the fear of reprisal. See this article for background. Also this. Dahn yoga might not be of interest to you, but this review is larger than that. It will show you how easy it is to publish material in a well known journal that is poor at best. Civilians are often shocked to discover that peer-review is only a weak indicator of correctness. This article removes some of that mystique...

“Peer-review. Peer-review. Peer-review.” This used to be every Climate Change Alarmist’s favourite mantra – most memorably deployed by tofu-crazed green activist Ed Begley Jr when he went postal on Fox News. Sadly, their beloved peer-review is now dead – killed by Climategate. So argues Patrick Courrielche at Big Journalism in the thoughtful piece I mentioned yesterday. He explains: The establishment’s peer review process is one that subjects an author’s scientific research to the scrutiny of other experts in the same field of research. An author typically submits their research to a recognized peer review publication, and this publisher then sends...

The emphasis is mine - upchuck NEW DELHI: Global alarm over climate change and its effects has risen manifold after the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since then, many of the 2,500-odd IPCC scientists have found climate change is progressing faster than the worst-case scenario they had predicted. Their studies will be considered for the next IPCC report, but since that will come out only in 2013, the University of New South Wales in Sydney has just put together the main findings in the last three years. Most are by previous IPCC lead authors "familiar...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

ClimateGate doesn’t just bring down the scientists who wrote the emails, it brings down all the institutions and organizations that were supposed to have exacting standards and ought to have exposed the crimes years ago. The men whose work was so bogus, were lauded by the IPCC, published in Nature and Science, and defended by the National Academy of Science. This evidence of collusion, falsification, hiding data, and consistent deceit blows away the infrastructures of the practice of science. It doesn’t hurt the scientific method, but it destroys the premise that the IPCC expert review means anything, that peer review...

Both Steve McIntyre and I are mentioned in this comprehensive summary. I’ve posted some excerpts below, with a link to the full report in PDF form. It is well worth a read. – Anthony Cold facts about the hot topic of global temperature change after the Climategate scandal THE WHISTLE BLOWS FOR TRUTH The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better. In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to...

Over the weekend, I came in for some probably deserved criticism from Clive Crook over my initial, somewhat airy, reaction to ClimateGate.  In my defense, he quotes my first post on the topic, not the follow up.  That was early innings, and my initial estimation of the emails that got the most press at the beginning--particularly the "trick" email--hasn't changed all that much.  Sexing up a graph is a bad thing.  But the world is not going to plunge off a cliff because of one overdone graph.  I've become considerably more concerned at items that have subsequently gotten more attention....

<p>LONDON — Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.</p> <p>The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.</p>

ClimateGate: Britain's Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication? In a statement released Saturday by the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is located, it was announced that all unit data, including data that had been denied climate skeptics, would soon be released to prove this is much ado about nothing. Unimpressed by the news is David Holland of Northampton, a grandfather with a background in electrical engineering, who is seeking prosecution of the CRU scientists involved in suppressing and even destroying...

The drab, drum-shaped home of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is an anonymous little outpost, blending seamlessly with its chunky concrete neighbours on a windswept campus just outside Norwich. To the uninitiated, it has the look of a Seventies bus station waiting for the council to pull it down. Unlikely as it may seem, however, this little corner of East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy which just might influence the entire future of our planet. A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained...

...Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU’s average temperature data doesn’t jive with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up...

Climate sceptics have lied, obscured and cheated for years. That's why we climate rationalists must uphold the highest standards of science. I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But...

What Al Gore is thankful for this Thanksgiving. (Includes an incredible image of the Whoremeister selling carbon nonesense.)

Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today sent letters to several scientists, some of whom allegedly manipulated data to prove the scientific "consensus" of global warming, as well as to the inspectors general of several federal agencies, notifying them to retain documents related to the release of emails from the Hadley Center's Climate Research Unit. He also stated in a press release: The stakes in this controversy are significant, as it appears that the basis of federal programs, pending EPA rulemakings, and cap-and-trade legislation was contrived and fabricated. Moreover, it...

I am disappointed to see folks like Lord Monkton calling for scientists to go to jail over what has been discovered in the Hadley CRU emails. No one is going to jail, at least based on what we know so far. Laws were broken, but of the type that perhaps people lose their jobs but not their freedom. And demanding that people go to jail just paints skeptics as opportunistic, over-the-top and vindictive. We sound like the looniest of the alarmists when we say stuff like this. This is not to say that the emails (as well as the source...

According to Thomas Bouchard, a US psychologist famous for his research on twins raised apart,[1] even scientists with good reason to believe that the majority are wrong can be silenced. The reason is...