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Wednesday, December 08, 2010
NASA and online peer review
Here you go:
“NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”
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The affair that we have somehow managed to avoid calling ‘Arsenicgate’ is, in essence, a story of everything that’s wrong about the relationship between science, peer review, the world of publishing, and the mainstream and independent branches of the media in 2010. In the rest of this post I want to try to pick apart the roles of the various people involved.
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The blogosphere is where this farcical handling of science outreach collided viciously with reality. What’s remarkable is that it was only at this stage that the checks and balances that ought to have prevented things going this far finally came into play, and when they did it was like watching a blob of cream cheese hit a metal grater at five million miles per hour.The quality, accuracy and context of material available on leading blogs exceeded that of much of mainstream media reporting by light years. While newspapers ran away with the story, it was left to bloggers like Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, Lewis Dartnell and Phil Plait to put things into perspective.
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Carl Zimmer then went one step further, and organized his own peer review process, recruiting a dozen scientists to give their opinions on the paper.Not only is this clearly peer review, it’s also peer review that managed to beat the efforts of one of the most prestigious journals in science. That has some serious implications for the future. It would be daft to talk about blogs taking over peer review, but clearly having lots of scientists discussing papers through social networks can achieve more than the current system, at least some of the time.
Glove-slap: NaOH.
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