Abstract
Publication forms the core structure supporting the development and transmission of scientific knowledge. For this reason, it is essential that the highest standards of quality control be maintained, in particular to ensure that the information being transmitted allows reproducible replication of the described experiments, and that the interpretation of the results is sound. Quality control has traditionally involved editorial decisions based on anonymous pre-publication peer review. Post-publication review of individual articles took the lesser role since it did not feed directly back to the original literature. Rapid advances in computer and communications technologies over the last thirty years have revolutionized scientific publication, and the role and scope of post-publication review has greatly expanded. This perspective examines the ways in which pre- and post-publication peer review influence the scientific literature, and in particular how they might best be redrawn to deal with the twin problems of scientific non-reproducibility and fraud increasingly encountered at the frontiers of science.
Highlights
The procedures for publication of written works have been elaborated from the time of William Caxton, and, using English, are the world-wide standard for scientific communication
Given the fact that internet-based communication is essentially free, and that most if not all of the scientific literature is accessible in electronic formats, it is logical that websites have recently emerged that provide anonymous forums for post-publication review
A final path to post-publication review is that taken by the individual whistleblower, but it seems likely that this approach will be subsumed by PubPeer and Retraction Watch given the greater efficacy of crowd-sourcing
Summary
The procedures for publication of written works have been elaborated from the time of William Caxton, and, using English, are the world-wide standard for scientific communication. Post-publication review provides a powerful means to identify and correct errors of quality control, of experimental design, and of data interpretation. Given the fact that internet-based communication is essentially free, and that most if not all of the scientific literature is accessible in electronic formats, it is logical that websites have recently emerged that provide anonymous forums for post-publication review. Biological datasets other than images can be subjected to statistical analysis to detect illegitimate manipulation, since these datasets necessarily contain noise derived from the means of measurement and from the properties of the system under study (Yong et al, 2013), and this noise should not display unusual characteristics Another popular website, Retraction Watch, currently funded by the Macarthur Foundation, deals with post-publication review in a different manner, instead presenting, as journalism, the end results, largely negative, of this process. A final path to post-publication review is that taken by the individual whistleblower (see, for example Yong et al, 2013), but it seems likely that this approach will be subsumed by PubPeer and Retraction Watch given the greater efficacy of crowd-sourcing
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