Monday, 4 March 2019

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.



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