publish or perish [or move to .005]

A series of articles in the Sciences et Médecine part of Le Monde reproduced coverages found elsewhere on the debates running within the scientific community on improving the quality of scientific papers. Through reproducible experiments and conclusions. And on using new bounds for the p-value, the solution to all woes! The article borrows a lot from the Nature proposal [discussed quite a lot here in the past weeks] and does not provide particularly insightful views. It however contains a coverage (rightmost columns) on a peer community approach called PubPeer, which was launched by two neuroscientists, Brandon Stell and Boris Barbour, both at CNRS, towards sharing comments on published papers. Mostly to criticise the methodology used in these papers. Or to point out multiple usages of the same graphs. Or doctoring of pictures. In the vast majority of cases, the papers are in biology and the comments not addressed by the authors of the papers. (With this exception of a discussion of the Nature paper covering the call for new bounds on p-values. Nature paper that had the appealing feature of calling for an end to `one-size-fits-all’ thresholds.) Creating a platform for discussing papers from a journal is already hard enough (as shown with the closure of Series B’log!), hence running a global discussion forum for all journals sounds hard to manage and foster. By which I mean it is difficult to fathom the impact of the discussions on the published papers and the journals where they are published, given the reticence of said journals to engage into reassessments of published papers…