Over-reliance on Trust and Lack of Objectivity
The present system is insufficiently objective as it relies, at each stage, on certain assumptions, trust and good faith.
• Peer reviews are conducted without a reliable system to counteract bias.
• Publishers have a potential conflict of interest, as they must decide what research is worth publishing from both a scientific and commercial standpoint.
Over-reliance of trust on authors: In the current system, authors wishing to publish are unable to be fully objective with their own research, and may overestimate the validity of their data in order to craft a story that is deemed suitable or novel enough for publication. Since most of the data that are obtained by the researchers and authors are in the centralised system such as their local servers and computers, data can be massaged, manipulated or mutated to sell the best narrative. Authors are also trusted that they remain objective in the face of hypothesis-defying results and interpret the date carefully and objectively. While crowdsourced wisdom is becoming a thing of importance in science, it is still more of an exception than a norm. As a result, the trust is placed in a centralised manner on authors to perform and publish science objectively. However, some scientists do take advantage of the system to manipulate data to varying degrees and thus corrupt the system. Scientists feel the pressure to omit ‘inconvenient truths’ that interfere with their developing storyline as the system demands stories, rather than science to be published. The result is an overwhelming number of irreproducible studies. Estimates are that around ⅔ of published work is not reproducible and that some of the work is a result of fraudulence (citation: NYTimes, Economist)
Over-reliance on the peer review system: Peer review is fundamental to scientific research and publishing, distinguishing it from virtually all other forms of output. It forms the basis for quality control of academic research, by having scientists in the same field review each other's work and provide feedback to help decide wheter or not the research should be published. However, at present it is unclear whether it meets these simple functions, and there is a large potential for disruptive innovation in this area (e.g.,
Tennant et al., 2017).
Bias: Editors and reviewers know the identity of the authors, and as they typically are in the same field of research as the authors, they frequently know each other personally. This opens the peer review system to potential personal, professional and social bias, both intentional and unintentional.
Pro bono: Reviewers do peer reviews usually without receiving a fee or any other form of compensation. Given that valuable time is needed to conduct peer reviews, reviewers frequently don't allocate sufficient time and energy to properly assess the quality of the research, as well as detracting from time spent on other duties.
Operational failure: There is a disparity between the ideal of peer review and its implementation. It is unclear whether it meets the standards to which it is held, and mounting evidence is pointing to its failure in finding errors in research, all the while discriminating against research that is viewed to be disruptive or innovative.
Wasteful: Often, manuscripts must go through repeated rounds of the ‘reject and resubmit’ cycle at different journals as researchers search for a venue of publication. This delays the communication of research while exposing redundancy in the process, as these reviews will often never be shared or used.
Over-reliance of the publishers: control of the middlemen.
Another part where there is over-reliance of trust is with the publishers. Publishers profit from publicly funded research which they have not directly paid for any more than any other private corporation through general taxation. The cost and risk of publicly funded research is therefore often on the taxpayer.
Private journals achieve high profit margins from publicly funded research, both by charging fees to publish and to access.
We postulate that both the desire and the demand to tell stories creates pressure in focusing only on publishable stories and not on the fundamental observations. During a research study, researchers make observations and discoveries which for various reasons are not published. Observations may be unrelated to the researcher’s area of study, resulting in the researcher not including it in the research paper as it is not relevant to them and it would cost more money to undertake further research to investigate it further. The researcher may not understand the importance of their finding, or the finding may be interesting but run counter to the narrative of the article the researcher is writing.
Reluctance To Publish Reproduced Results: Being able to reproduce results is one of the cornerstones of high quality science. However, most journals are not interested in publishing reproduced results, as they are deemed to have low commercial value. Scientists are unable to easily verify whether a finding is true or not. A substantial amount of research which could contribute massively to the scientific world and society as a whole is wasted and never published. Money, resources, and time are wasted trying to perform analyses and gather data that have been done before, but simply never published.