News Ages Quickly - Scientific publishing moves into the 21st century at last

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 21^st century than it did in the 17^th century.

Last week, one of the world's leading scientific journals, Nature, conceded this fact by launching Nature Precedings. Nature Precedings aims to be an online "place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents." The new archive will make contributions from biology, medicine, chemistry and the earth sciences available online. The articles, papers and presentations are evaluated for relevance by an editorial board but are not subject to more rigorous peer-review.

Nature Precedings and the life sciences are finally catching up with physicists and mathematicians. In 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg launched arXive.org (the X is pronounced as the Greek letter Chi). ArXive is an online system for distributing scientific research results which bypasses the conventional avenues of scientific publication. ArXive offers open access to 427,608 e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology. E-prints are not peer-reviewed by editors but readers can decide for themselves how scientifically valuable they are.

Besides online pre-prints, scientific publishing is moving rapidly toward an open access model. In February, 2000, the National Institute of Health's National Center for Biotechnology Information launched PubMed Central, its open access archive of over 350 biomedical and life sciences journals. Two weeks ago, PubMed Central announced that it had archived its millionth article. The year 2000, also saw the creation of the open access British publisher, BioMed Central which has now grown to 177 peer-reviewed journals. All BioMed Central journals are available at PubMed Central. In 2002, the University of Lund, with support of the Open Society Institute and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition created the online Directory of Open Access Journals which currently lists 2725 journals. Last week, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require that all research the agency funds be made publicly available on the internet within one year after journal publication.

Also in 2000, three prominent biomedical researchers launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Initially PLoS encouraged other scientific journals to make their articles available for free online. In 2003, PLoS began launching a series of online peer-reviewed open source electronic journals. Although arXive publishes pre-prints without peer review, Ginsparg foresaw the possibility that segments of the scientific community (he suggested non-profit scientific societies that publish journals) might "continue to organize high-quality peer-reviewed overlays." .

In a sense this is what the PLoS journals are now doing. Since clinical biomedicine depends on the results of randomized control trials, peer review currently remains an important process for maintaining data quality. In addition, there is the real possibility that desperate patients might be misled by bad or incomplete biomedical information. Harold Sox, editor of Annals of Internal Medicine has noted, "If a medical article gets out and it's wrong, the consequences may be greater." Based on such concerns, Nature Precedings will not accept any submissions describing the results of clinical trials or those making specific therapeutic claims.

Of course, peer review is no absolute guarantor of scientific validity. Martin Blume, editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society and its nine physics journals, says that peer review overlooks honest errors as well as deliberate fraud. "Peer review doesn't necessarily say that a paper is right," he notes. "It says it's worth publishing."

And in any case, peer review is changing from a one time evaluation by anonymous reviewers of a self-contained research article to a continuous online process. PLoS has launched a new comprehensive online journal, PLoS One, featuring reports of primary research from all disciplines within science and medicine. The editorial board will make prompt decisions on whether or not any particular paper merits publication and may refer it to outside reviewers. But unlike print journals, publication is not the end of the peer review process.

Once an article has been published on the PLoS One site, community-based open post-publication peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating begins. Post-publication peer reviewers can briefly annotate the text of the article with corrections, additions, or links to other relevant articles. They may also engage in online debates concerning the content, conclusions, and consequences of a specific paper. And finally, users may assign ratings to papers. The hope is that online critiques will detect errors or fraud more quickly. This is peer review on steroids.

At PLoS One, comments and annotations may not be anonymous. According to the PLoS good practice guidelines for commenting post-publication reviewers should confine their criticisms to the demonstrable content of papers and avoid speculation about the motivations or prejudices of authors. It may be "good practice" now, but it is inevitable that that in the future post-publication peer reviewers will disclose any associations (proper and improper) that they believe relevant to the findings reported in a paper.

As Ginsparg noted eleven years ago at a UNESCO conference on the future of electronic publishing, "in some fields of physics, the on-line electronic archives immediately became the primary means of communicating ongoing research information, with conventional journals entirely supplanted in this role." Science, Nature, and Cell have nothing to worry about if it turns out that open access and pre-print websites don't attract cutting edge articles. On the other hand, it a good bet that opening access and speeding research to the public via online archives will accelerate scientific and technological progress just as their 17th century precursors did.

"In 2002, the University of Lund, with support of the Open Society Institute and .."

"..George Soros, the billionaire financier and founder of the Open Society Institute."

The Shadow Party

"....The Shadow Party’s most intriguing pages provide an ominous portrait of the Hungarian-born billionaire who, in one interview, expressed his wish to become “the conscience of the world,” ....Intellectually, Soros declares himself a disciple of Karl Popper and of his former prof’s “open society” philosophy. Yet Soros has little sympathy for an America that is clearly more “open,” by Popper’s standards, than the one the philosopher praised in the early 1950’s...

...The arrogance suggested by Soros’ hopeful self-designation, “the conscience of the world,” is echoed less benevolently in a comment made to The New Republic in 1994: “Just write that the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.” Additional doubt is cast on Soros’ philanthropic motives when, as in Kosovo and Russia, the global mogul mixes open society initiatives with shady financial deals. ..

Stories that describe Soros’ tenuous relationship to the Jewish community are also instructive. ...

...Blaming the victim, it seems, is typical for Soros, who immediately rejected a military response to 9/11 and articulated instead a policy of self-scrutiny. For Soros, the best way to retaliate against terrorism is global redistribution of wealtha policy that a few years earlier (inasmuch as he and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs redistributed multinational funds in the new Russian state) resulted in “one of the greatest social robberies in human history.”

Viewing events through the lens of moral equivalence is another Soros trademark. ... The billionaire promoter of “open societies” is also, it seems, an opportunistic financier and stealthy kingmaker - a man whose globalist fantasies and contempt for America are matched only by delusions of grandeur rooted in a desperate lack of self-awareness and moral perspective. ..."

“..Good and bad. But, I’d rather have the access than not.” ~ Mobile Vulgus bttt

I agree, for the reasons I’ve excerpted [1] from the article here, and [2] the commentary I’ve copied and pasted below:

[1] From the article: “They may also engage in online debates concerning the content, conclusions, and consequences of a specific paper. And finally, users may assign ratings to papers. The hope is that online critiques will detect errors or fraud more quickly. This is peer review on steroids. .... [But people should] avoid speculation about the motivations or prejudices of authors. .. but it is inevitable that that in the future post-publication peer reviewers will disclose any associations (proper and improper) that they believe relevant to the findings reported in a paper. ...[it’s] a good bet that opening access and speeding research to the public via online archives will accelerate scientific and technological progress just as their 17th century precursors did.”

[2] Commentary:

“I’m reading an interesting book entitled The Wisdom of Crowds, which is full of counter-intuitive insights until you think about them for a moment and realize that they’re not really so counter-intuitive at all.

Surowiecki’s main point is that groups are often smarter than the smartest individuals. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that this certainly applies to the allocation of scarce resources, which decentralized free markets accomplish much more efficiently and effectively than any individual ever could, no matter how brilliant.

But it turns out that the collective wisdom of crowds generally surpasses experts in most realms, so long as the crowd satisfies four conditions: diversity of opinion (note: the very opposite of the leftist definition of diversity), independence of thought (opinions are not determined by the opinions of those those around them), decentralization (in particular, the ability to draw on local knowledge), and aggregation (a mechanism for converting private judgments into a collective decision).

It turns out that if you assemble a group of just the brightest people to solve a problem, it will actually be less effective at solving the problem than a more diverse group with fewer brilliant people. (One immediately thinks of how our liberal looniversity bins have become such cognitively sealed asylums of foolishness.) For one thing, smart people tend to resemble each other in what they can do and how they think: “Adding in a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the group’s performance..... The development of knowledge may depend on maintaining an influx of the naive and the ignorant.... Groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less new information to the table.”

To cite just one example, between 1984 and 1999, almost 90 percent of all mutual find managers underperformed the Wilshire 5000 Index, “a relatively low bar.” In short there was no correlation at all beween expertise and accuracy in predicting the stock market. Nevertheless, the more educated one is, the more one is likely to overestimate one’s abilities and judgment, not just in the field of finance, but among “physicians, nurses, lawyers, engineers, entrepreneurs,” who all believe they know much more than they actually do. Here, Paul Krugman comes to mind, an expert economist who is merely wrong about everything, every time.

Obviously there are unwise crowds, but for very specific reasons. Surowiecki cites the example of what entomologists call a “circular mill.” In the early 20th century a naturalist came upon a group of army ants in the Guyana jungle. They were moving in a huge circle some 1,200 feet in circumference, one ant following the next, in a closed loop that took each ant two and a half hours to complete. The circle went on for a couple of days, as one ant after another eventually dropped dead from exhaustion and starvation.

Surowiecki explains: “The [circular] mill is created when army ants find themselves separated from their colony. Once they’re lost, they obey a simple rule: follow the ant in front of you. The result is the mill, which usually only breaks up when a few ants straggle off by chance and the others follow them away..... The simple tools that make ants so successful are also responsible for the demise of the ants who get trapped in the circular mill.”

This is an example of an unwise group. Why? Because its members are not independent decision makers. They just follow each other blindly. As Surowiecki explains, independence prevents people’s mistakes from becoming correlated, from everyone making the same mistake. Secondly, “independent individuals are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.”

Exactly like the internet. And exactly unlike the MSM and its political action wing, the Democratic party. (And, I might add, the liberal R & D facility known as the university system.)

Let’s hearken back to last week’s post on Political Entomology and Blue-Bellied Liberals. There I noted that the liberal world is full of “media ants, Hollywood ants, academic ants, singing ants, judicial ants, educational establishment ants, and lastly, political ants who all run around randomly bumping their heads together, so that they’re constantly regurgitating little half-digested bits of information and feeding them to one another. Pretty soon, just like the ants, they’re all the same color.”

In fact, it’s even worse than I thought—our hopelessly lost and disoriented liberal elites are caught in a circular mill! They’ve lost touch with reality, but each is simply obeying the simple rule that he should blindly follow the liberal ant in front of him, even if it means going around in circles or taking the country over the cliff.

Remember the words of Thomas Lifson, writing on The Liberal Bubble: our liberal elites inhabit a “comfortable, supportive, and self esteem-enhancing environment. The most prestigious and widest-reaching media outlets reinforce their views, rock stars and film makers provide lyrics and stories making their points, college professors tell them they are right, and the biggest foundations like Ford fund studies to prove them correct.” Liberals “are able to live their lives untroubled by what they regard as serious contrary opinion. The capture of the media, academic, and institutional high ground enables them to dismiss their conservative opponents as ill-informed, crude, bigoted, and evil.” Liberalism has been reduced to an “in-group code, perfectly understandable and comforting among the elect, but increasingly disconnected from everyone else, and off-putting to those not included in the ranks of the in-group.”

Not only have liberals become detached from the greater colony—as reflected in plunging ratings, fleeing readership, and diminished influence—but they have become increasingly detached from reality itself. Plodding along in a grim circle, the New York Times following behind Ted Kennedy and Howard Dean, Time and Newsweek trudging along behind the New York Times, CNN trundling behind Time and Newsweek, academics apeing other unoriginal academics, Air America slinking behind Howard Dean, dailykos goose-stepping after George Soros, George Soros shuffling behind Ted Turner... it’s endless and yet finite, because it’s a circle. The circle is certainly internally consistent—in fact, there’s no diversity at all. Nor is there much contact with what you or I would call reality.

It couldn’t be more different than the mighty internet, more on which tomorrow.” ~ Robert W.Godwin [Gagdad Bob], Ph.D - a clinical psychologist whose interdisciplinary work has focused on the relationship between contemporary psychoanalysis, chaos theory, and quantum physics.

Clink below to access the hot links to the above commentary:

Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Political Entomology, Part II: Liberal Ants and Their Circular Mill
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2005/12/political-entomology-part-ii-liberal.html

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