[HN Gopher] A sharp-eyed scientist became biology's image detective
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A sharp-eyed scientist became biology's image detective
Author : hprotagonist
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-06-29 21:50 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| dhdc wrote:
| Non-paywalled link:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210701031117/https://www.newyo...
| frisco wrote:
| This seems like an interesting use for crypto-style staking.
| Rather than simply paying Elsevier or Springer to publish, which
| is a transaction that increasingly makes no sense, instead take
| those fees and put them in an interest-generating escrow account.
| If the paper is retracted within some window of time (say, 3
| years), the money goes to the group that found the problems. If
| not, it gets returned plus interest to the authors or their
| organization.
|
| This would create an economic incentive to hunt scientific fraud,
| and possibly even replication studies, while also over time
| putting the money that's currently just being gouged by legacy
| publishers back into science.
| murphyslab wrote:
| Elisabeth Bik has done some amazing work catching these kinds of
| errors. I occasionally follow Retraction Watch which cites her
| efforts regularly, [0] about 500 times or so. However, as she
| points out, she doesn't get compensated for this work:
|
| > We need this to be a career that people can make money and use
| their talents in. [1]
|
| Journals, IMO, should adopt something like a Knuth reward check
| [2] as an actual system. They, after all, are the ones profiting
| the most from our present system of scientific publications. I'm
| not sure what's fair; maybe 100 USD for catching a major post-
| publication error?
|
| It's currently a system where most of the incentives operate in
| opposition to self-correction.
|
| [0] https://retractionwatch.com/
|
| [1] https://retractionwatch.com/2019/05/07/meet-elisabeth-bik-
| wh...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
| grawprog wrote:
| For those who may appreciate it:
|
| https://outline.com/pKdazw
| Renevith wrote:
| Elisabeth Bik is a real hero. the amount of unpaid hours she has
| put into detecting fraud in published scientific papers is
| unbelievable and a true service to the scientific community.
|
| Her work is pure positive externality: nobody has incentive to
| pay for it. Journals barely care about fraud (as long as it's not
| caught by someone else), reviewers don't have much incentive to
| check carefully for it (and might even be in on the fraud), and
| the authors engaging in fraud obviously prefer that journals not
| look too closely.
|
| That's why I am a patron: https://www.patreon.com/elisabethbik
|
| She maintains a blog if you want to read more about what she
| does, e.g.:
| https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/12/31/2020-a-year-in...
| kens wrote:
| Elisabeth Bik is worth following on Twitter:
| https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest She posts images from
| widely-cited scientific papers and then her followers race to
| find the duplications in the images. These challenges range
| from easy to very hard.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| https://archive.md/ubuOr
| se4u wrote:
| Before someone asks about why can't this work be automated,
| here's the FAQ where she answers this question.
|
| https://scienceintegritydigest.com/frequently-asked-question...
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(page generated 2021-07-01 23:00 UTC)