+++Journal editor resigns+++

Wolfgang Wagner, editor of the open access journal Remote Sensing, has resigned over the journal's publication of the Spencer and Braswell paper.

Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published.

After having become aware of the situation, and studying the various pro and contra arguments, I agree with the critics of the paper. Therefore, I would like to take the responsibility for this editorial decision and, as a result, step down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing.

This is quite extraordinary. Can it really be believed that Wagner heard "in various internet discussion fora" that the paper was wrong and on that basis has resigned?

A little later he says this:

If a paper presents interesting scientific arguments, even if controversial, it should be published and responded to in the open literature. This was my initial response after having become aware of this particular case. So why, after a more careful study of the pro and contra arguments, have I changed my initial view? The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some [extent] also in the literature (cf. [7]), a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers.

Something being questioned "to some extent" in the literature does not represent a resigning matter. This really doesn't look very good to me.

Monbiot on academic publishers

George Monbiot is excoriating on the subject of academic publishers, and in particular their profits.

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

With there being three big publishers, there is of course no monopoly as such, although of course one can argue that there is a cartel operating. With returns of 40%, one can make a good case that this is the case.

However, from where I am standing it looks more like yet another case of the state hosing down a private sector business with taxpayers' money. Lacking any incentive to reduce their costs it's hard to see the universities making any efforts to break the stranglehold of the big publishers - what's in it for them?

A philosopher on Climategate

I've always been rather unimpressed with philosophy and philosophers - I keep feeling that there is much less there than meets the eye. I don't think this article in the New York Times is going to change my opinion much. In it, philosopher Gary Gutting looks at the AGW `consensus' and Climategate and frankly doesn't make much of a case. Here he is on Climategate:

Some non-expert opponents of global warming have made much of a number of e-mails written and circulated among a handful of climate scientists that they see as evidence of bias toward global warming. But unless this group is willing to argue from this small (and questionable) sample to the general unreliability of climate science as a discipline, they have no alternative but to accept the consensus view of climate scientists that these e-mails do not undermine the core result of global warming.

The "consensus view" about the emails that Prof Gutting cites is an article about the Russell review, which was not exactly chock-full of climate scientists and was not exactly full of people who could be described as honest brokers either. Prof Gutting also seems to have missed the point about the emails - if they really show that the peer reviewed literature was largely closed to sceptics, then yes climate science as a discipline is unreliable.

Conflict of interest

Updated on Jul 1, 2011 by Bishop Hill

The AGW upholder community is all a-quiver with the news that Willie Soon received a lot of money from the oil industry. Even Monbiot himself is on the case, with a stream of tweets on the subject:

Secret funding of climate change deniers exposed again: bit.ly/m6Yjlp. Key issue here is that interests never declared.

Click to read more ...

More climate gatekeeping

Richard Lindzen outlines the steps taken to prevent his recent paper with Choi being published in PNAS.

The rejection of the present paper required some extraordinary violations of accepted practice. We feel that making such procedures public will help clarify the peculiar road blocks that have been created in order to prevent adequate discussion of fundamental issues. It is hoped, moreover, that the material presented here can offer the interested public some insight into what is involved in the somewhat mysterious though widely (if inappropriately) respected process of peer review.

One prominent mainstream climate scientist told me that I knew "perfectly well" that accusations of climate gatekeeping were baseless. It doesn't really look that way to me.

Minority event

There is an interesting live chat at Sciencemag with Laura Manuelidis, a scientist who opposes the prion theory of BSE. Her story has a familiar ring:

Unfortunately, self-interest makes a few "expert" powerful scientists less than open to those who disagree with them. In TSEs, they populate most of the grant committees and are also the same people who are on the the editorial boards of most journals. Anonymous "peer" review allows people with a clear conflict of interest to make false statements. Without transparency they can never be held accountable. Their success is a poor ethical model for young scientists. And it also limits financial support for more creative approaches to a problem

Darrell Ince on the tranny

Darrel Ince is interviewed by Tim Harford about the difficulties of getting corrections made to scientific papers.

Darrell Ince on wrong papers

Scientists and the public interest

The Royal Society has launched a new project to consider how science can be made to work for the public.

Scientific research has an enormous impact on our world and the lives of citizens. It is therefore important that science is not, and is not seen to be, a private enterprise, conducted behind the closed doors of laboratories, but a public enterprise to understand better the world we live in and our place in it. Effective dialogue about the priorities and insights of science and its relation to public values is vital. Scientists can no longer assume an unquestioning public trust.

The general theme of the project seems sound. As I have pointed out before, scientists have perverse incentives - as civil servants their economic incentive is to publish more, to attract attention and to grow their funding. The public interest is not particularly a priority. And with the Australian chief scientist noting that he sees himself as a lobbyist for the scientific community - no doubt the same situation applies in the UK - this conflict of interest is laid bare. So the idea of trying to get scientists working for the people who pay them is a good one, but I hold out little hope of an effective remedy.

And anyway, I'm not sure the Royal Society wants anyone to take the project seriously. The project is to be led by none other than Professor Geoffrey Boulton, a man whose record on creating public trust in UK science is a tad shaky, to say the least. The panel also includes Philip Campbell, the editor of Nature, whose record is little better.

More data libertarianism

Times Higher Ed is once again hot on the trail of academics who fail to disclose their data.

Academics have been accused of failing to make use of new technology to improve research because they are "selfish" and bogged down in the peer review system.

Speaking at a British Library debate, organised by Times Higher Education, academics and students agreed that researchers had not embraced new technology to share their data and findings.

Addressing the question "What is the future of research?", Matthew Gamble, a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Manchester, said that despite projects such as Galaxy Zoo, which shares academic data with the general public, the culture of the "selfish scientist" was holding back British research.

"Altruism is quickly beaten out of young academics in favour of retaining data and making sure you can produce as many publications as possible," he said.

Climate consultancy

On the subject of conflicted panels, I was thinking about Sarah Muckherjee's statement that NGOs were paying for climate research. I'm pretty sure that nobody has come across universities paid anything by NGOs in relation to climate research, but a comment by Richard Tol suggested that consultancy payments often go straight into academics' bank accounts rather than university coffers. This would make it impossible to trace them, even via FOI.

In medical science similar situations arise, and the journals have put in place a requirement for scientists to make positive declarations regarding conflict of interest. Do any climate journals carry such a requirement?

Scientists behaving badly

Times Higher Education has a cover story about scientists behaving badly. The focus is on biomedical research and, in particular, the story of how two dogged biostatisticians named Baggerly and Coombes struggled to expose the errors in a paper on chemotherapy by Potti and Nevins.

The Climategate parallels in the story are obvious.

As well as the article (which is by Darrel Ince of the Open University) there is an accompanying editorial, which looks significant.

We may struggle to change human nature, but we ought to be able to ensure that journals, as Professor Ince says, "acknowledge that falsifiability lies at the heart of the scientific endeavour" - they must be less quick to dismiss challenges to their published papers and more willing to admit mistakes.

Duke itself has acknowledged that in work involving complex statistical analyses, most scientists could benefit from a little help from the statistics department before publishing.

Professor Ince goes a step further, arguing that all elements of all the work (in the Duke case, the full raw data and relevant computer code) should be made publicly available so that others can replicate or repudiate the findings.

In this age of information and the internet, that can't be too difficult, can it?

SciTech on peer review

The House of Commons inquiry into peer review is live streaming from 10:15 this morning. I will not be able to watch, so reports and comments are particularly welcome.

The stream should be here.

RS Publishing responds

In the wake of my posting about the changes in the Royal Society Publishing's policy on data openness, I wrote to the man in charge, Dr Stuart Taylor asking for his comments and specifically what prompted the change. I'm grateful to Dr Taylor for a full and thorough response, which I am posting here with permission.

There is certainly no intention on our part to "weaken our policy," nor have we received any representations from anyone asking us to modify it. What you read on our website simply provides more information that the earlier instruction and the intention was, in fact, to tighten the policy from the rather briefer earlier wording by asking our authors to state, at the time of submission any conditions of data sharing that might apply. The change was approved by our Publishing Board in October 2008 in the light of Briffa et al and Matthews et al.

The proof of any policy is in its implementation, as I am sure you will agree. The fact that there exist discipline-specific conventions does not mean that we are any less strict in obtaining data when requested. In fact, I notice that you qualified your initial post later:

"I've edited the main post shortly after posting it as I'd missed the fact that they were still saying that requests had to be complied with..."

I disagree that it is contradictory - as there has been no "watering down." Our policy on data sharing has been widely praised and is something that most of the commercial publishers do not have in their publishing policies. As the UK's national academy, I believe we should be setting an example in this area and I would not accept an article from authors who sought to keep their data private without a very strong case indeed. So your question about how we would flag such articles is somewhat hypothetical.

Please be assured that this policy "has teeth" and we take its implementation seriously. A good case in point was the Matthews article in 2008.

But if I have not managed to persuade you, please don't hesitate to contact me again by phone or email and I shall be happy to discuss the issue further.

I have replied to Dr Taylor that the policy still reads as though it has weakened, but that I am happy to take him at his word that I am mistaken and that the policy still has teeth.

The Royal Society and openness

Remember how we all cheered the Royal Society when Phil Trans Roy Soc B forced Keith Briffa to release the Yamal data? At last a journal with some integrity, some adherence to the principles of the scientific method, we all said.

This was why Briffa's hand was forced: a policy on openness that had no wriggle room for those who might think about cheating (my bold):

As a condition of acceptance authors agree to honour any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article.

Interestingly the Royal Society now has a new policy on openness (my bold):

To allow others to verify and build on work published in Royal Society journals; authors must make all reasonable efforts to make materials, data, statistical tools and associated protocols available to readers. Authors must disclose upon submission of the manuscript any restrictions on the availability of materials or information. We recognize that discipline-specific conventions or special circumstances may occasionally apply, and we will consider these in negotiating compliance with requests.

...

After publication, all reasonable requests for data and/or materials must be fulfilled. Authors may charge reasonable costs for time and materials involved in any such transfer.

[Postscript: I was able to retreive the original policy via the Wayback Machine - a wonderful tool for finding lost pages from the web. Interestingly, Royal Society Publishing now appears to have blocked robots.txt, preventing the Wayback Machine from taking snapshots in future.]

Update on Apr 17, 2011 by Bishop Hill

I've edited the main post shortly after posting it as I'd missed the fact that they were still saying that requests had to be complied with. The new policy therefore seems contradictory - on the one hand they are saying that requests have to be complied with and on the other saying that in dodgy fields, they'll consider allowing authors not comply.

Peer-to-peer review

From the Chronicle of Higher Education via here and here.

Open peer review—which gives anyone who’s interested a chance to weigh in on scholarly content before it’s published—just got an institutional boost. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given New York University Press and MediaCommons a $50,000 grant to take a closer look at open, or peer-to-peer (P2P), review, the press announced today. MediaCommons is a digital scholarly network hosted by the NYU Libraries and affiliated with the Institute for the Future of the Book.