Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science

by Stuart Ritchie

Journals don’t just have the role of disseminating research to the world – they make the decisions on what gets published. What if we were to separate these two roles entirely?73 One radical proposal goes like this: after completing a study, scientists write a preprint and upload it to an online repository. They then request that it be reviewed by a review service: a new kind of organisation that recruits peer reviewers in the usual way but that is separate from any scientific journal.74 The service reviews the paper and gives it a grade. The authors, if they wish, can then go back and revise the paper, collect more data, or whatever else is required, and resubmit the improved version for a new grade and, they will hope, a higher one. Journal editors, whose role in this system is more like curators than gatekeepers, can peruse all the graded preprints and choose those that they would like to include in their journal.