
Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles - vixen99
http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/04/five-reasons-blog-posts-are-of-higher.html
======
ChicagoBoy11
I'm surprised that so many of the comments seem to attack the claims in the
post along the dimension of "well, anyone can write a blog post." I think as a
community HN would staunchly advocate that the recipe for building great
companies or software is an almost radical devotion to reducing any and all
barriers to entry, except in this domain somehow people feel that the rigidity
and exclusivity which journals provide somehow lead to the betterment of
science. Makes me think about pg's "what you can't say" post.

There is short shrift given to the distortion that gets introduced in order to
"get published". The "file drawer" effect is very real, and it gives us a very
skewed view of what the actual scientific work being done really is; p-hacking
and other statistical trickery are table stakes to anyone trying to survive in
the academic world, as being published is a key metric to success yet it is
surprisingly orthogonal to being right. As Brian Nosek's "reproducibility
project" is uncovering, there is a non-trivial amount of "science" out there
that is pure garbage, and much of it was produced in order to "get published."

In a world where "random hackers" can write twitter bots to parse scientific
papers and uncover obvious mathematical flaws (which sometimes invalidate
central claims of the paper), I don't understand how we aren't immediately
gravitating to standards which promote more and more openness.

Lastly, the biggest issue we have to address is the fact that notoriety is now
the chief indicator of success, and not genuine scientific discovery. In
college I had world-famous faculty who have made a career, fortune, and placed
themselves well on the spotlight on the backs of research which was later
completely reversed -- and not in the way "science is supposed to work" sense,
but rather in the "you purposefully fudged the math" sense. And yet there was
virtually no reputational damage done to their career. Worse yet, I think it
is clear that this lack of ethics actually is a direct cause of the success
they enjoy today. Given that these are pressures faced by all in the academic
community, true openness is the one avenue we have to counteract this sort of
thing, and hopefully enterprising individuals come along and find a way to
make "truth-seeking" reputation something researchers care about.

~~~
colmvp
One of the reasons why I sometimes dislike my industry (design) is it's filled
with a lot of Medium posts that get highly upvoted by say, emerging or other
adept designers, yet it's rare that someone will substantiate their claim with
data to prove that a rule or belief that they state is actually true.
Sometimes I feel like designers believe x only because other designers believe
x, when in reality non in-group behavior might suggest something completely
different, that x is irrelevant, unnecessary, or confusing.

What I enjoy about learning about other subjects that make claim in research
papers is that it is at least legitimized through a rigorous process. One can
substantiate that y is better than x because tests show doing y requires less
computing time than doing x. Or that doing y results in higher accuracy of the
model. While getting a research paper published is an imperfect process where
even high quality ideas get rejected for at times pretty trivial reasons, I
can appreciate the process itself mostly results in a sharpened idea.

~~~
YCode
> Sometimes I feel like designers believe x only because other designers
> believe x, when in reality non in-group behavior might suggest something
> completely different, that x is irrelevant, unnecessary, or confusing.

Parallax scrolling sites come to mind. They look pretty, but quite often are
terribly dysfunctional to navigate and use for a customer who just wants to
learn about or buy(!) your product.

~~~
aggie
Is _your_ assertion backed by data?

Here's a study that disagrees with you, at least in terms of how many people
have trouble with parallax (2 out of 43). [http://uxpajournal.org/the-effects-
of-parallax-scrolling-on-...](http://uxpajournal.org/the-effects-of-parallax-
scrolling-on-user-experience-in-web-design/)

Not to say that study is a comprehensive judgment on the design pattern.

~~~
YCode
TL;DR for anyone wandering by:

> We hypothesized that PS would improve UX, which is defined in this study as
> the emotions that are aroused when a user interacts with a product or
> technology. The PS website was perceived to be more fun than the no-PS
> website. With respect to perceived usability, enjoyment, satisfaction, and
> visual appeal, there were no differences between the PS website and the no-
> PS website.

Great that someone formally studied it, though I'm a little put off by their
subjects demographics as compared with potential customers of any given
business. That is, I feel like students at a university are more adept at
using interfaces than "the average user" who is going to be your potential
customer.

1/5 factors they tested did signal added value, the 1 being "fun". More fun,
but not more usable. I'm not yet convinced that fun correlates to sales in
this context as much as usability, ESPECIALLY once the initial wow factor
wears off.

I assume by "trouble" you mean motion sickness. Two of them had motion
sickness, not just run-of-the-mill confusion from the usability of the site.

All that said, the main point I was making was that often designers spend a
great deal of time trying to get PS working just right not because they think
it will bring in more customers or make their site more usable, but because
that's what other designers are showcasing and they want to emulate that
trend.

------
CJefferson
One reason blogs are of lower scientific quality -- anyone can make series of
large and unresearched claims, cherry picking a few examples to claim a broad
point.

Good journals do have peer review, and they wouldn't have accepted this.

Also, one big disadvantage of blogs -- depending on where you host it, they
often don't last long, and point 4 (easy to edit) is a blessing and a curse,
particularly if people edit things without telling you they did it.

Of course, blogs have their place, I keep one myself, it's great for breaking
news, explaining things in greater depth, sharing and understanding. And
journals could learn from blogs / arxiv (make it easier to make corrections,
allow discussions).

~~~
shubhamjain
Getting a research paper published sounds so meritorious, no matter how
idiotic or trivial it is. Take for example, Princeton 'research' in 2014 that
predicted that Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017 [1]. The evidence?
Google trends data which has near-zero correlation with DAUs of Facebook. The
research not only got published, but also got a wider-audience after major
media websites covered it.

Had it been a blog post, I don't think anyone would have taken more than a
cursory look at the analysis. Yes, anyone _can_ fit data points and reach a
conclusion with blogs, but isn't academic research fraught with similar
problems already?

[1]:
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-
princeton-researchers-infectious-disease)

~~~
kilburn
You picked a bad example. The actual source article is published at... arxiv.
From an academic perspective it is worth exactly as much as a blog.

Academic literature has many problems but it is way above the blogosphere in
that regard. And media coverage is going to suck no matter where stuff is
published...

~~~
gpm
> From an academic perspective it is worth exactly as much as a blog.

From the perspective of peer review, yes. But per google scholar that paper
has been 66 cited times, including in many articles that _are_ in at least
somewhat reputable journals (published via Elsevier, ieee, Springer, etc) and
apparently two books [0]. So I think it's pretty clear that being a
"scientific paper from Princeton" was significant reputation wise regardless
of whether or not it was peer reviewed.

[0]
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Epidemiological%20model...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Epidemiological%20modeling%20of%20online%20social%20network%20dynamics&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

I was also skeptical about the citations so I checked that two with freely
available pdfs were actually this paper, they were

[1]
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4ebb/b654c59aff454ad97301e6...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4ebb/b654c59aff454ad97301e6ecd9e82c69122b.pdf)

[2]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.07805.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.07805.pdf)

~~~
bbctol
Right, but it's _not_ a scientific paper. It's a problem when people trust
something just because it came out of Princeton, but the problem you're
identifying isn't one with scientific papers (and the citations you've
identified are places where they're using the Cannarella paper as an example
of people being interested in applying epidemiology to social networks, not
citing the research they did as accurate or important.)

------
afandian
(to repeat a comment I made on the blog)

We're seeing a huge amount of non-traditional scholarly activity (if you'll
pardon the dry phrase) happening in blogs. Alternative metrics aka altmetrics
(as distinct from altmetric.com) have been taking in to consideration the
scholarly activity that happens around traditional publishing for a while.
Crossref, the organisation who brought you DOIs for scholarly publications,
thought that it would be a good idea to help collect this kind of data as a
counterpoint to traditional publishing and citations. We're building Crossref
Event Data, which is a free (libre, gratis) service for collecting mentions of
articles on blogs and social media, so that it can be used by the community in
all kinds of ways. Discoverability, recommendations, and yes, maybe more
metrics. How you use it is up to you.

The article raises a good point about blogs as primary methods of publishing
rather than, for example, as a venue for the discussion of traditionally
published articles. Establishing an open 'citation'-graph-like-dataset of
blogs is a good first step toward that.

We're heading into Beta soon, and you can read more about it
[https://www.crossref.org/services/event-
data](https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data) . The User guide is a work
in progress, but might answer any questions you have:
[https://www.eventdata.crossref.org/guide](https://www.eventdata.crossref.org/guide)
. You can also contact me at jwass@crossref.org if you have any questions.

------
mikk14
People here seem to attack only the argument about "anyone can write a blog",
but I was expecting HN to give a couple of thoughts also about his first
point. To me it reads something like: "publish all your data out in the open
for everybody to see".

I find it _extremely_ problematic. Sure, sharing data is necessary to verify
that the conclusions are supported by it and they are not due to
methodological errors. But to _anyone_? Out in the open? I would expect better
data ethics, especially from a psychologist.

Your data can contain political opinions, health records, sexual orientation,
contact information, the places a person has visited, and when. People sign up
for these studies usually with the agreement that the information that can
harm them cannot be freely shared, unless to people involved in studies with
similar data protection systems. Data like I mentioned has sometimes to be
stored in computers not connected to the Internet, to reduce the risk of data
leak. Free access to this data paves the way to persecution and shaming.

If I were to sign up as subject to a psychology study and had a person with
his ideas leading it, I'd withdraw immediately. I'd question if this person
should be a psychology researcher at all. Sharing data is good, but protocols
are there for a reason.

~~~
metalliqaz
Personally identifiable details can be removed from data.

~~~
mikk14
There is a seminal paper showing how carelessly adopting this point of view
can lead to disasters: "87% of the U.S. population is uniquely identified by
date of birth, gender, postal code" [1]

In many other cases, as pointed out, it's just not possible. I'm studying
mobility patterns through cellphone metadata. Even if you strip out the actual
phone number with a random ID you still know where a person is going, and thus
re-identify them if you have other public data.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latanya_Sweeney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latanya_Sweeney)

~~~
user5994461
full name + date of birth + place of birth.

That leaves about 500 non unique individuals in a country of > 50 million
inhabitants.

------
tkt
Titus Brown also a blog post on this earlier this year "The top 10 reasons why
blog posts are better than scientific papers"
[http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-top-ten-reasons-blog-
posts....](http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-top-ten-reasons-blog-posts.html)
and it generated similar discussion.

There are a few elements they emphasize.

One is what the blog format enables that traditional publishing doesn't
support. Those are things like having real-time feedback and comments, being
able to version and making the blog post interactive, rather than a static
document. Another element to the format is a lack of gatekeepers, so it can be
quickly disseminated and disseminated by anyone, so there aren't barriers to
participation in the scientific discourse.

Another is norms and expectations. In blogging, it is more the norm that data
and code are open. Open is still possible in traditional publishing; it just
isn't yet the norm. A new format however, enables new norms and it's easier to
set them from the start, than try to revise existing ones.

Finally, there's the element of 'correctness'. Going through peer review and
being in a traditional journal certainly doesn't ensure that the paper is
correct. You can just look at retractions to see that
[http://retractionwatch.com/2011/08/11/is-it-time-for-a-
retra...](http://retractionwatch.com/2011/08/11/is-it-time-for-a-retraction-
index/). However it would be interesting to see more evidence around whether
the blog format does ultimately lead to more 'correct' conclusions, on the
whole, and not just for the posts that lead to a lot of discussion.

------
mrdrozdov
Is it so hard to publish at arxiv, share the paper on twitter, and submit a
link to HN? At a minimum, arxiv is better than a blog post because there's
some sense of versioning.

For anyone who is curious, some conferences share the peer review comments
(even though they do not share the identities of author or commenter). Here
are the comments from iclr2017
([https://openreview.net/group?id=ICLR.cc/2017/conference](https://openreview.net/group?id=ICLR.cc/2017/conference))
and here are comments on Ian Goodfellow's GAN paper by Jürgen Schmidhuber and
others
([https://media.nips.cc/nipsbooks/nipspapers/paper_files/nips2...](https://media.nips.cc/nipsbooks/nipspapers/paper_files/nips27/reviews/1384.html)).

------
pdkl95
For some time I've thought that the concept of a "journal" artificially forces
together several features that can exist independently. This usually includes
something roughly similar to: (not a complete list, or in any particular
order)

1\. people that want to publish their research, theories, response, _etc_

2\. a mechanism for having submissions peer reviewed

3\. curating which submissions will be included in the publication

4\. actually physically (or electronically) publishing and disseminating the
papers to the interested community

5\. people actually reading it and responding (possibly recursively)

6\. reputation and status derived from authorship, being referenced by others,
_etc_

7\. archiving the papers - _and hopefully the data_

These features are traditionally part of the same process for practical
reasons like the cost/time to physically publish before modern printing
technology. This worked, creating resistance to any change. Now, I suspect
that over reliance on the concept of a "journal" limits your thinking. This
article demonstrates some of that with it's framing of blogs as an alternative
or competitor to journals.

Instead, consider that modern computing and the internet make #4 very easy and
almost free. We have various ways to archive (#7), which include actual
verification (e.g. "git fsck", signed commits). We already curate (#3) as a
separate step with specialty blogs and aggregators like HN.

I'm not saying journals are bad or obsolete. I'm just suggesting that there
might be better ways to organize the process, and that different granularities
of "journal"-like process can probably coexist.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
Many of these topics are constantly being championed by the somewhat obscure
digital libraries space. These departments are mainly found in universities,
and they focus heavily on the pipeline you described. Despite the point you
made that throwing content on the internet is usually easy and "almost free",
it's actually a pretty large and costly effort when you're trying to do it at
scale. A lot of clerical and engineering effort goes into
tagging/organizing/storing/replicating the data, guarding against bit rot and
other integrity errors, and making the data easily searchable and browsable
(and that's to say nothing of the political and psychological battles involved
in simply getting researchers to follow through and provide the data to these
processes, in the proper formats, before they finish their degree and
disappear).

If the hacker side of these challenges interest you, I suggest checking out
the code4lib community: [https://code4lib.org](https://code4lib.org)

~~~
marcosdumay
Still, compared to what it used to cost to just distribute it, and compared to
the cost of journal subscriptions, it's approximately free.

------
dahart
> Blogs have Open Peer Review

No, they don't. This is conflating having an opinion with the scientific
review process. The scientific review process can prevent publication of bad
research in journals and require changes before publication, the blog "review"
process cannot do either of these things.

------
shouldbworking
I feel comment sections on well targeted sites like HN are better than peer
review sometimes.

It's not uncommon for an industry expert or creator of a product to Koolaid
Man into the comment section around here.

~~~
marcosdumay
I didn't stay any long on the academic world, but the comments on targeted
tend to be better than nearly all peer review I've seen there.

The thing is, the very small exception is incredibly good.

------
westurner
So, schema.org, has classes (C:) -- subclasses of CreativeWork and Article --
for property (P:) domains (D:) and ranges (R:) which cover this domain:

\- CreativeWork:
[http://schema.org/CreativeWork](http://schema.org/CreativeWork)

\- - BlogPosting:
[http://schema.org/BlogPosting](http://schema.org/BlogPosting)

\- - Article: [http://schema.org/Article](http://schema.org/Article)

\- - - NewsArticle:
[http://schema.org/NewsArticle](http://schema.org/NewsArticle)

\- - - Report: [http://schema.org/Report](http://schema.org/Report)

\- - - ScholarlyArticle:
[http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle](http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle)

\- - - SocialMediaPosting:
[http://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting](http://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting)

\- - - TechArticle:
[http://schema.org/TechArticle](http://schema.org/TechArticle)

Thing: (name, [url], [identifier], [#about], [description[_gh_markdown_html]])

\- C: CreativeWork:

\- - P: comment R: Comment

\- - C: Comment: [https://schema.org/Comment](https://schema.org/Comment)

------
4258HzG
#1 Reason: Blogs aren't included in the publication count which is needed to
gain research funding, get hired as a professor and get tenure.

A bit cynical, but a lot of the problems the writer suggests are more of a
symptom of trying to get as many papers out as possible than the cause (and
that one rarely reviews the supplementary material). If scientific blogs
counted like publications many of the same problems would appear there.

------
lr4444lr
The author calls "Nature" a "low quality journal". Is that really it's
reputation?

~~~
capnrefsmmat
Its reputation among people like Lakens, and others complaining about the poor
state of statistics and rigor in modern science, is that it features
overinterpreted overhyped results from small underpowered experiments, and
when errors are pointed out it's usually not too interested in correcting
them. The editors are more interested in "important" results than
methodologically rigorous ones.

It's similar to how Andrew Gelman always sarcastically refers to the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as the Prestigious
Proceedings, because that's invariably the adjective used in news reports, yet
many of the articles are of the "female-named hurricanes cause more damage"
type.

------
IanCal
Unless they're properly archived along with all their resources as well as
only referencing other properly archived material, I'd be very cautious before
saying they're better.

This _can_ be done, but I suspect it is rare whereas it's the norm with a
journal article.

~~~
steventhedev
I think they serve different purposes, and the quality varies heavily across
subfields. Academic research will produce a journal article as the primary
output, whereas a blog post is typically a side effect of a practical project,
and most will contain a link to the actual code.

Ultimately, I think they're both good, but they do have different uses.

~~~
IanCal
I'm still highly concerned about the loss of these things. I very regularly
follow links to code that's just gone. The code for research definitely should
not only exist in a related of post link.

Archiving, for me, is a requirement if you think it should be used over more
than a year or so.

~~~
steventhedev
Obviously, having a professional librarian working on archiving data, code,
and articles is ideal. However, I've found that the public facing side of
journals experience bit rot even faster than most of the older blogs. Of
course, there are exceptions, and even the most public figures can decide to
delete everything, code included (e.g. _why)

Gwern has tackled link rot[0] in an exhaustive way, and may give you a
starting point from where to continue.

[0]:
[https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs)

------
aviggiano
It seems the future lies in something like GitHub, stack overflow or quora for
articles, where people with the best code/answers naturally gain more
reputation and where you still have an incentive for peer review and open
data.

------
colorincorrect
As in, "if you follow these best practices, you too can produce high quality
research"

There is no reason why this post should be focused on blogs in general, asides
from generating discussion + clickbait. The key here is actually following the
best practice, but do most blogs actually do this?

Alternatively: there is a high minimal requirement for research articles, but
there is no minimal requirement for blogs.

------
88e282102ae2e5b
I think it might be better to say that contemporary psychology is frequently
not being performed scientifically.

------
notahacker
Advantages that scientific journal articles have over blogs is that they are:

(i) not written in clickbait format

(ii) impact is measured in terms of other research which sees it as a relevant
study to cite rather than numbers of pageviews (see also (i))

(iii) one of the things a peer review process can flag up is that bold and
implausible claims like "On blogs, the norm is to provide access to the
underlying data, code, and materials" probably need some form of qualification
for what is meant by "blogs" and/or quantitative evidence to support that
claim

Blogs can be well reasoned and evidence-based, comments can (even more
infrequently) be enlightening and journal articles aren't immune to flaws, but
the linked blog article is a prime example of _why_ arguments expressed in
blogs are seldom afforded the respect of arguments advanced in journals.

~~~
lucb1e
> (i) not written in clickbait format

Really? I find them to be incredibly clickbaity whereas blog posts are much
more matter-of-fact. Blogs are almost never a commercial entity/enterprise and
while no writer would shun search engine traffic, they usually write for
peers, not for publicity like journalists or scientists, both whose funding
depends on this.

~~~
notahacker
I have yet to see the stereotypical "5 reasons why [bold claim involving zero
research]" format the linked blog post uses uses in _any_ academic journal.

Scientific writing in closed-access journals is the definition of writing for
peers, and never includes AdSense, affiliate links or digital tip jars.

------
baali
One more related link on the same subject, "The top 10 reasons why blog posts
are better than scientific papers": [http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-top-ten-
reasons-blog-posts....](http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-top-ten-reasons-blog-
posts.html) * there is a "maybe satire" tag added by the author to this post.

------
pjc50
"Impact factor" systems incentivise the production of poor quality journal
articles. Effectively researchers end up needing to produce a certain amount
of "journal-bait" in order to stay funded.

(See HN passim "Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse")

------
agumonkey
There's a lot of publications. Some of them are really small step attempts at
understanding. Sometimes it's just a test. A careful one, but nothing more. I
guess in some fields we're still at the poking level.

------
Spooky23
IMO This is one of those cases where people are committed to an existing
system and have bent their thinking around that system to the point that they
cannot see the big picture.

There's alot of value to the existing journal system, but perhaps it would be
appropriate to have a more formal process and a more informal/collaborative
process. Maybe that would address the problems with having so many journals.

------
afandian
Can anyone recommend scholarly / academic blogs (or aggregators)?

~~~
pjc50
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/)
"In The Pipeline" is good and has been running for years.

~~~
afandian
Thanks! Looks great.

------
logicallee
They left out the biggest one! If you say something dumb in it, the comments
will crucify you for it :)

~~~
daxelrod
And also if you say something controversial.

~~~
logicallee
What you point out is an interesting effect. Blog posts that are controversial
know that there's a chance a sh$#storm will ensue in the comments. In the case
of general bloggers, such as researchers i.e. not people who are actively
trying to troll or generate pageviews, but on personal blogs, how does this
affect writing that is controversial?

I don't know academic publishing well enough to compare. I think that as far
as controversial claims that would make it to somewhere like Hacker News, the
effect is that if the controversial statements are _wrong_ , then the comments
will shoot them down, and the story will be buried. Furthermore, the rest of
the comments will pile on the first comment that points out that the blog post
is mistaken.

Perhaps an effect of this is that you can tell from the tone that some blog
posts take, that they are being extremely careful to lay a rock-solid
foundation, and kind of "convert" their readers who might otherwise vehemently
disagree with them. For a recent example, check out this blog post:

[https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-
po...](https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-point/)

I actually just noticed something really interesting! The very first words in
this blog post are: "I got metaphorically spanked a couple of days ago."

Would any academic article on any subject start in this way?

So the _effect_ of the backlash against controversial statements, on the
writing style of blog posts, is interesting and in many cases highly visible.

It is hard for me to compare this with academic writing. (But it certainly
wouldn't start with words like that.)

------
ylem
I can't comment on the field of psychiatry. However, I will comment on my
field of physics. The author seems to completely neglect the signal to noise
problem. There has been an explosion of journals and scientific publication.
It's rather hard to keep up to date on the literature and editors do provide a
valuable function in filtering what they think is interesting (which is
further filtered by the referees). Also, for the referee process--it's not
perfect and will probably not catch complete fraud. But, it is good for
checking the basics of whether or not the story being told in a paper is
consistent. Also, again related to signal/noise, the editors hopefully choose
referees with a minimum level of competence in the field (not always, but
usually). Also, in terms of dilution--if there's a blog, there's no guarantee
that a critical mass of people will read it to try to give it a critical
review. Whereas, even for a journal that is not widely read, the papers in it
will have received some peer review where someone in the field tried to take a
look through it for obvious errors. I am not convinced by open peer review.
Let's consider two scenarios. Suppose there is a leader in the field trying to
publish something (or perhaps even a friend or collaborator). If I notice that
they are wrong, am I more likely to call them on it if I am anonymous or if
they know who I am? One can be idealistic, but researchers are people too. I
think that the anonymous review allows people to speak frankly (though it does
sometimes let people be mean--that seems to be the cost of anonymity in forums
unless there is strong moderation). Let's consider another scenario. Suppose I
am a junior researcher and I get a referee comment that I determine is wrong.
If it comes from the leader in my field, maybe I won't push back as hard as if
it came from someone else junior--again, in an ideal world, it wouldn't
matter, but researchers are people too. It would seem that the editor knowing
the identity of the referees would serve as a check on bias, not 100 percent,
but I think that more is gained than is lost from a closed referee system.

In terms of error correction, there are errata that are published if someone
finds an error in a major study and in journals like the physical review are
linked back to the original article.

The open data problem is hard. In my particular field, our raw data is
available on the web, but the problem is that the meta-data needed to
interpret is not. And that's nontrivial. For example, I may perform several
operations on my data (for example, background subtraction) before fitting it
to a model. We are experimenting with dataflow languages where we embed the
series of "filters" that we apply to the data, but if we want someone to be
able to reproduce this 20 years from now, then there's a whole ecosystem that
would have to be maintained--for example, not just my code, but all of the
libraries that it depends on to run. We can describe the basic process in the
paper, but for true long term reproducibility, it's a hard problem...There are
groups that are working on open-data and reproducible research, so I don't
think that there isn't interest, just that it's not as easy a problem as you
might think. But, for reduced data, I agree, it would be nice to have that
available for papers in a machine readable format...

Open access. This is also a hard problem. Increasingly, funding agencies are
requiring that publications be made available in an open format after some
embargo period. I think that may be the best we can hope for. Just paying for
competent editors requires funding. If we want additional features like data
attached to papers (for decades), it will take more funding. That money has to
come from somewhere. For typical open access journals, the author pays, but
that seems to create difficult incentives--not to mention that it makes it
difficult for poorer funded researchers to publish. I'm not sure what the
right answer is, because I agree that the public should be able to see the
results that they paid for--perhaps an embargo period is the best solution...

I think a blog is a great way for communication of ideas and for education,
but I do not think that it is able to replace publication in a refereed
journal.

------
rechecker

      "Why can... "
    

Uh, shouldn't that be "How can... "?

~~~
scottmf
Why?

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soufron
Can't they?

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leecarraher
blog post on blogspot advocating that blogs are better than journals seems a
bit biased, unfortunately i don't think i can get a journal article about
journal articles being better, accepted in any peer reviewed journals.
checkmate daniel.

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JohnStrange
In my opinion blog posts have no scientific quality at all, since they are not
peer reviewed. They may occasionally have quality, but that's another matter.

To be fair, some fringe journals have no scientific value either, because they
do not peer review properly, but they are easy to spot and everybody in the
scientific community knows them.

On a side note, originality is one of the key requirements for publication in
a reputed journal and I have not ever seen a blog post that made any
scientifically original claims. But maybe that's because I don't read blogs
very often.

~~~
maaaats
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project)

Bunch of mathematicians collaborating through blogs.

