> [P]osting unreviewed research on a preprint server is not new or controversial [...] But palaeoanthropology is not a field that needs urgent research and rapid breakthroughs. Given the huge and wide public interest in human evolution and our origins, this research field benefits from much slower, measured, and careful research.
@joeroe Interesting! But is traditional peer review better? I think the elife model attempts to reflect that neither preprint nor peer review guarantee scientific value. This requires a different view of what a paper is though. With elife an open, fallible and continuous process, as opposed to the rejected=inadequate/published=immaculate implied by the traditional approach. My impression is that the elife stamp of inadequacy & open review+comments works better than with the Gunung Padang debacle
@isakroa I suppose the thing is do you need preprints to do open review, though? Conceivably (or PCI, etc.) could restrict access until the first reviews/recommendations are in. The end result would still be open, but it would reduce the risk of results being disseminated to the public before they're ready.
That said, the elephant in the room is the assumption that peer review—open or closed—is actually effective at filtering out bad science, which I'm not at all convinced of.
@isakroa What the quote above really made me think about was whether we (i.e. the humanities) are adopting the preprint model because of its merits, or if we're just because it's bundled up with the "open" model of other fields that we want to emulate.
@joeroe Absolutely. I agree thats worth contemplating. Some potential could lie in the ability of the preprint framework to be used not only to get research out quickly. There is of course preregistration, the record of versions, public comments and the post-print, but there are also examples of documents shared without concern for publication (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01808) or to be living documents thats never meant to be finished (e.g. https://lakens.github.io/statistical_inferences/)
@joeroe that is so true. I have always wondered about it and thought that preprints were unnecessary for us. As I write my last thing, I cannot imagine a world in which people need to have advance sight of it before publication.
@joeroe I can't agree on this point. Especially Amazon pré-históric archaelogy has a deep impact on widespread and urgent themes:
native American land rights
native American land use and the knowledge to save Amazon rainforest
growth of other, non-hierarchical complex societies
Especially the survival of the Amazon rainforest, the knowledge that it's not prestine, but outcome of millenial-long sustainable techniques, and how they work.
@K_Reuss_Manaus I don't think the intended meaning here is that palaeo research isn't important or impactful (quite the opposite), just that it can usually afford to wait 6 months for peer review.
Maybe that's my fault - when the authors say "not urgent" it's in comparison to research on COVID-19 in the first months of the pandemic, but I had to cut that out to fit the quote within 500 characters.
Add comment