RE: Can we trust peer-reviewed papers?
Very interesting video. I wrote an article regarding some of these issues. I agree largely with the video. But the video seems to suggest that the problem is with the open access and online journals only and that the only ones to be relied on are the paid high impact factor journals.
The problem is general, the whole journal industry, paid or open access or online, has serious issues with reproducibility and peer review.
Many of the paid journals, which supposedly have strong peer review processes, contain results that are not very reliable.
I am a PhD candidate chemist and I have access to the university library with many "serious" journals. I have found many articles which turn out to be valueless. In my specific field we have learned to trust only publications from 2-3 specific laboratories.
NEITHER "serious" journals nor open access and "free" journals are free of these problems.
Paying for an article is absolutely no guarantee anymore for the quality of the article.
Some universities are rebelling against the paid journal industry and have created Open Access
repositories, before being able to publish there the university reviews and evaluates the publication. So it is not true either that Open Access means it is not peer reviewed.
Here is my perspective on the problems as a scientist around producing papers to get published. I wrote about Open Access sources a while ago:
https://steemit.com/science/@lys/scientific-articles-what-you-have-published-is-no-longer-yours
Here is an excellent article by another writer on Steemit
https://steemit.com/science/@kyriacos/science-under-attack
Agreed, but thankfully the scientific process it self exposes these flaws. If we can come up with a better method, let's do it and spread it.
Your first article starts to touch on copyright stuff which just gets me all frustrated at the ridiculousness of government. I'll read the others as well. Thank you!
This is why everything has to be on a per-article basis.
Going per-group/lab is also good as laboratories form and cement existing trust networks.
Loved your article - following!
Open access is great but not fully executed.
Http://sci-hub.bz for the win.
I agree that the video has a bit of an anti-open access bias. I think there are also crappy closed access journals too. Impact factors are not infallible and can be "gamed", but they provide a pretty quick clue about a journal's standing within its field, whether open access or not.
A better understanding of what peer review is and isn't would help the community when scientific results are taken from their specialised fields and publicised in the wider community.
I think the biggest problem in all of this is academic laziness and failure to apply critical thinking.