Are we there yet? Not yet~~

My little angel likes this popular rhyme on CoCoMelon channel of youtube, while the second angel

feeds her. Over the time, I started loving this too. Perhaps, I find it soothing  and fetch some psychological comfort or perhaps it might have soothing effect on anyone.  The rhyme describes how kids got bored of long drive to picnic and how their parents engage them in fun.

Here is the rhyme:

Kids: Are we there yet? Parents: Not yet.
Kids: Are we there yet? Parents: Not yet.

Parents: Let’s play a game, Look at where we are
Won’t you look with me, And tell me what you see
Driving in the car

Parents: What do you see? Kids: A deer....

Parents: What do you see? Kids: A lake....
Parents: What do you see? Kids: A rainbow...
Parents: What do you see? Kids: A cactus...
Parents: What do you see? Kids: A tumbleweed...
Parents: What do you see? Kids: Rocks...
Parents: What do you see? Kids: A train...
Parents: What do you see? Kids: A windmill...
Parents: What do you see? Kids: A cow...
Parents: What do you see? Kids: A tractor...

Everybody:It’s so much fun, To drive so far
Let’s look outside, And enjoy the pretty ride
Driving in the car

As it radiates through our house, I feel as if this is meant for scientists or (may be for artists too or may be for everyone) who are often professionally dissatisfied with their present understanding, efforts and achievements. Everyday starts with the same intellectual dissatisfaction about what we are able to realize and an urge to know the logic or lack thereof in nature. What immediately follows is a positive vibe of how I should deal with my everyday's anxiety.  What I miserably fail to do is to enjoy the ride itself and rather hope impatiently for some elusive destination. For scientists, a piece of new information is a source of joy, which is often difficult to unearth ourselves from our own science. However, we focus too much on the discovering the truth ourselves, despite realizing that the truth  takes its own sweet time to unravel itself to us. What instead we should do, and supposedly many of us are already doing this, is to teach ourselves the new truths discovered by others: the literature reading. We often fail to read literature everyday and even if we read, we are not guaranteed to learn something interesting and appealing.  Good news is that one interesting information serve as food for thought for several days and seems perfect replacement to our anxiety . What we should make sure is that we feed our mind new, interesting and important information as regular as possible. It has worked for me at least.  

The most absurd time in scientific publishing

Denying the evidence on the face, blacking out the key findings and dismissing the novelty for no genuine reason seem routine response from science journals to me. It is very difficult to understand why and how the scientific community has become so hostile to their own colleagues. I am amazed by the innovative ways the reviewers and the editors find  reasons to reject the manuscript.  In one instance, the editor dismissed our findings by just focussing on the 1st two lines of the abstract (which are generally of introductory nature) and completely blacked out the main findings written thereafter.  Despite my arguments, the editor held on to the argument that the role of conserved noncoding elements in development is well known, while that was never the claim. The claim was that the lineage specific position-effect of CNEs, without any sequence divergence, in mammalian genome can impact the developmental trajectories of brain development and showed a link with the loss of cortical gyrations of rodent brain. I challenge if any one finds any literature evidence in that context. Nevertheless, arguing further led to editor's formal stand of applying for a formal appeal along with the a note that addressing appeals is not their priority and can take indefinite time: a trick to finally convince the authors to withdraw their submission altogether.  Consider another example: One of the reviewers argued that our finding was not novel and instead of citing the evidence or data, he/she shamelessly projected some supplementary excerpt of casual and extrapolative nature from a paper. Irony was that the other reviewer clearly mentioned that there is no literature available on such an analysis and considered the manuscript for a revision. Yet, the editor decided to go by the reviewer who had negative and rather misleading comment. How lame is that the editors do not bother of checking some facts themselves and how uninformed they can be. Reviewers hide behind the the confidentiality clause of referee's comments and lie shamelessly.   I can  project numerous more examples similar to the aforementioned ones. 

Take a break and think of converse. Often, I see articles with non-novel, expected and rather unconsolidated observations, but are published in top journals.  This is even bigger a mystery to understand. Most people reason that social ties, nepotism and lobbies fetch such outcomes. Really? Is science publishing  that worse?

There seems some serious problems with the peer review system. Why this confidentiality clause for reviewer's comments? Why I can't I copy paste those comments on social media to expose the editors, reviewers and the cooperate publishing houses? Why do journals' policies decide where my fight against editor and reviewers should end? Why don't we have an independent judiciary for science communications? And, more importantly, who should decide whether a paper should be accepted/published or not? Should these be 2-3 people on this planet? Why can't we have it opened to the community  similar to biorxiv and then open it for  review by the scientific community, cross-communications with the authors, addressing of comments and get a score for each article. Such a score can simply be a indicator of article's impact.