Free Republic

Lynn Margulis.Javier Pedreira A dispute between the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and an academy member has put the fate of three studies in question. In the wake of rows over a controversial paper published by the journal online in August — but not in print — two additional papers linked to the same academy member are now in limbo.Last month, PNAS editor-in-chief Randy Schekman wrote to academy member Lynn Margulis, a cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, asking for "a satisfactory explanation for [her] apparent selective communication of reviews" for...

Has intelligent design passed peer review? That's the claim ID-proponent William Dembski makes in a coyly-titled blog post: "New Peer-Reviewed Pro-ID Article in Mainstream Math/Eng Literature". He has a new paper on search algorithms out in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Dembski, a Senior Fellow at the ID think tank Discovery Institute, instantly goes on the defence: "Our critics will immediately say that this really isn't a pro-ID article but that it's about something else (I've seen this line now for over a decade once work on ID started encroaching into peer-review territory). Before you believe this, have...

Scientific issues often deal with items that are too complex and technical for many people to grasp. When these issues touch on public policy, the problem of educating the public is compounded because partisan special-interest groups often mischaracterize or disregard the best available evidence in order to further their agendas. Obviously, this can often result in the enactment of ineffective or counterproductive laws or government programs and also unnecessarily excite the public. A National Academy of Engineering report says, "As a society, we are not even fully aware of or conversant with the technologies we use every day. In short,...

Sirs, you say: “And perhaps some scientists are coming out against the idea that humankind has warmed the planet and continues to spew increasing pollutants into our atmosphere. If so, they are awful quiet about their challenge. Perhaps they should post their arguments here and let NRDC’s real climate experts take them on.” Well, I am an Expert Peer Reviewer for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); i.e. I am one of the often touted “thousands of UN Climate Scientists”. I and thousands of others speak, publish and sign petitions in attempt to get the media to tell...

What the railroading of a teacher by technically inept police and prosecutors reveals about the criminal justice system In October 2004, Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut, was teaching a seventh grade language class. While Amero was using a laptop computer—one accessible to both students and teacher—the computer began spinning off pop-up ads for pornographic websites. Amero concedes she was checking her email and surfing the Internet while she was supposed to be teaching. Perhaps that makes her a bad substitute teacher (though she had taught at the school for a year and a half without incident). But...

Top Scientists Ask Medical Journal Science To Retract Original AIDS Papers SAN FRANCISCO (Rethinking AIDS) Dec. 9, 2008—The international nonprofit scientific organization Rethinking AIDS gave its full support today to 37 senior researchers, medical doctors and legal professionals who are requesting that the medical journal Science withdraw four seminal papers on HIV authored by Dr. Robert Gallo—papers widely touted as proof that HIV is the "probable cause of AIDS." An online posting of the letter can be found here. "With new findings that undermine the scientific integrity and veracity of Gallo's four papers, the entire basis of the theory that...

We are a little late to the party, but it is worth adding a few words now that our favourite amateur contrarian is at it again. As many already know, the Forum on Physics and Society (an un-peer-reviewed newsletter published by the otherwise quite sensible American Physical Society), rather surprisingly published a new paper by Monckton that tries again to show using rigorous arithmetic that IPCC is all wrong and that climate sensitivity is negligible. His latest sally, like his previous attempt, is full of the usual obfuscating sleight of hand, but to save people the time in working it...

Slowly Strangling America's Golden Goose© 2006 J. Marvin HerndonTransdyne Corporation   Imagine: You wake up tomorrow and find that America’s judicial system has changed. Now, prosecutors can present secret witness testimony and only provide their own brief excerpts or summaries to the defense; judges are no longer independent, they have been replaced by the prosecutor’s boss. Your first thought, “Now, we will get much needed criminal convictions.” Then, “Ohmygosh! Are we in deep yogurt! We have seen all that before, in the Spanish Inquisition and in virtually every totalitarian regime on Earth, so we know what will happen. Soon...

Web Journals Threaten Peer-Review System Sunday, October 01, 2006 By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer LOS ANGELES — Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online. Instead of having a group of hand-picked scholars review research in secret before publication, a growing number of Internet-based journals are publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by the authors'peers. It's then up to rank-and-file researchers to debate the value of the work in cyberspace. The Web journals are threatening to turn...

Cause for celebration? UCSF's Keith Yamamoto is leading a committee to reimagine peer review at NIH.Credit: UCSF BETHESDA, MARYLAND--Scientists conducting a sweeping examination of the peer-review system at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are considering some radical ideas to revamp the process, they revealed today. At a meeting here of the advisory committee to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, members debated everything from doing away with the current scoring system on grant proposals to incentives that might improve the quality and motivation of reviewers. Although peer review is still considered a cornerstone of science, it is experiencing new pressures. The...

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong. Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye. These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more...

Arguably, the Information Age began in 1665. That was the year the Journal des scavans and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London started regular publication. Making new scientific information more easily and widely available was the spark that ignited the Industrial Revolution. The founding editor of the Journal des scavans, Denis de Sallo, chose to publish his new journal weekly because, as he explained, "news ages quickly." Scientific news ages even more quickly in the 21st century than it did in the 17th century. Last week, one of the world's leading scientific journals, Nature, conceded this fact by...

On 18 November 2004, Isabelle Chuine and co-workers published a research paper on global warming. The paper appeared in Nature, the world's most highly-regarded scientific journal. And it gathered some publicity. Chuine et al. claimed to have developed a method for estimating the summer temperature in Burgundy, France, in any given year back to 1370 (based on the harvest dates of grapes). Using their method, the authors asserted that the summer of 2003 was the warmest summer since 1370, in Burgundy. I had been following global warming studies only as a disinterested outside spectator (and only occasionally). Someone sent me...

Time magazine once called author David Horowitz "a clear and ruthless thinker. What he says has an indignant sanity about it." n it he offers "indignant sanity" as he draws blazing portraits of some of the worst leftist propagandists now infesting America's colleges and universities. Those unfamiliar with the extent to which the nation's campuses are being held captive by left-wing radicals will find his revelations shocking. He goes about the task of unmasking the most virulent of academic terrorists who brook no dissent from their student victims. "More than 90 percent of the professors profiled in this text have...

FEATURE Is Peer Review Broken? Submissions are up, reviewers are overtaxed, and authors are lodging complaint after complaint about the process at top-tier journals. What's wrong with peer review? BY ALISON MCCOOK Peter Lawrence, a developmental biologist who is also an editor at the journal Development and former editorial board member at Cell, has been publishing papers in academic journals for 40 years. His first 70 or so papers were "never rejected," he says, but that's all changed. Now, he has significantly more trouble getting articles into the first journal he submits them to."The rising [rejections] means an increase...

Free speech, peer review, and scientific scandalsIn his wonderful book The Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch notes that our Enlightenment civilization stands on three pillars: democracy, which is how we determine who gets to wield legitimate coercive force; capitalism, which is how we determine who gets what; and what Rauch calls liberal science, which is how we determine what is true. In Rauch's conception, liberal science embodies the principle that the "checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right." Liberal science encompasses everything from the most biased activist pamphlet to peer-reviewed...

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration proposed new guidelines Monday that it said would prevent overfishing, part of a plan for managing the nation's marine resources. Critics say they ignore important recommendations from a presidential commission. Tougher fines and penalties, more peer-reviewed science studies and market-based decisions are other measures that will "help us toward ending overfishing and rebuilding our fish stocks," said Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The bill describes how to reauthorize the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs the nation's ocean fisheries. Its authorization expired after 1999, though its provisions remain in effect....

The paper by Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," in vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239 of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was published at the discretion of the former editor, Richard v. Sternberg. Contrary to typical editorial practices, the paper was published without review by any associate editor; Sternberg handled the entire review process. The Council, which includes officers, elected councilors, and past presidents, and the associate editors would have deemed the paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings because the subject matter represents such a significant departure...

A pro-Darwin lobbying group is being accused of trying to censor a published and peer-reviewed scientific article that deals favorably with the theory of intelligent design. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) claims the article by Dr. Stephen Meyer is "substandard science" and should not have been published by the peer-reviewed biology journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. But Dr. John West, associate director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC), says the NCSE has flip-flopped just like a politician. "The refrain of Darwinists up till this point has been intelligent design isn't science...