On 3/4/20 9:57 pm, Glen Turner wrote:
... ethics of putting out a preprint outside our immediate area of
expertise during a major public health crisis ...
The papers referred to are in arxiv.org which provides drafts of
scientific papers. These have been approved by a moderator, but not yet
through the peer review process. The intention is to get preliminary
results out quickly.
Arxiv, and similar pre-print repositories, are not intended for the
general public, but as they are open access anyone can read them. The
problem is that the average person, or journalist, will be impressed by
the scientific language and graphs, and not understand that the content
had not been checked completely.
I have seen at least one paper on COVID-19 which looks, on the face of
it, to be of value. But this was from a team of engineers and
epidemiologists.
The criticism of the authors of the papers I suggest is misdirected. The
fault is with the process. Criticism should be with the moderators who
allowed these papers to be published, and with the process, which should
require more rigor. Perhaps more than just a single moderator is needed.
If any member of the scientific community really thinks a particular
paper is a danger to the community, they can criticize the authors
publicly, or make a complaint of unethical conduct.
Anyone who has reviewed scientific papers knows the flood of dross they
get: assignments from students, work which has already been published,
papers off topic, stuff cobbled together from the Wikipedia, and
material which is from people well meaning but don't know what they are
doing. It is a routine part of the process to reject all this stuff.
However, this is getting increasingly difficult, and I expect we will
see more use of automated tools.
--
Tom Worthington, MEd FHEA FACS CP IP3P http://www.tomw.net.au
+61(0)419496150
TomW Communications Pty Ltd. PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia
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Honorary Lecturer, Computer Science, Australian National University
https://cecs.anu.edu.au/research/profile/tom-worthington
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