JoNova:
The termination of the Pattern Recognition journal ought to be PR gold for skeptics. Nothing like this happens to unskeptical scientists, ever. It’s a telling spectacle.
A major science publisher gasped in horror that one amongst its scores of journals had “doubted the IPCC”, so the journal had to be axed forever. Oh the Crime! The over-the-top dummy-spit exposes the religious zeal in a supposedly scientific process. So much for the hallowed “Peer Review”. Fans of establishment science want us to believe it’s a gospel part of the scientific method, but it is neither intrinsic nor essential, and skeptics should not be fooled into thinking it is.
Peer reviewed papers may be gems or junk but we won’t know which by discussing who reviewed them.
Let’s follow due process in science, but that is not by review whether peer-or-pal, it’s by prediction, test, observation, and repeat.
Some people seem to have lost sight of this, and think that skeptics ought to be trying to play the Peer Review Game according to the fine print of arbitrary rules dictated by unscientists who hate skeptics and who don’t even play by the rules themselves. The game belongs to them – they set, change and break the rules, and they decide who gets an invite to the clubhouse. But in the end, the review game is a sideshow, and it is usually used to lock out those who question a consensus.
Should skeptics maintain the high ground? Absolutely, but the real high ground is another level entirely. I’m not going to fight to preserve the current system. Decisions by anonymous unpaid reviewers are not worth much and never will be, the incentives are too weak. We need accountability and responsibility of one individual, not so much committees, or brand-names, or boards.
Anyone who claims that science only exists on official approved pages of anointed publications is a Gatekeeper of Dogma. (How many trolls respond to a valid point by saying “why don’t you publish it in the peer review?”) Real scientists know that the truth is not dependent on where it was printed, nor who reviewed it. It’s time to rise above the Gatekeeper’s Rules, not fight over them.
The rules are arbitrary, the hypocrisy rife. When establishment climate scientists do pal-review they call it peer review; when skeptics do anything that could be construed as pal review, it’s “nepotism and malpractice”, and destructo-the-journal. Seriously?
It’s about politics not science. The publishers themselves said:” PRP was never meant to be a platform for climate sceptics”. No one can define “climate sceptic” in scientific terms (who denies there is a climate?). It follows that if PRP was used as a platform for climate unskeptics, presumably that would be fine.
Neither Peer nor Pal is perfect. Open review is the only one that counts
You don’t need to have a science degree to understand that there is nothing rigorous or scientific about what happened. The charge of “nepotism” was added as an afterthought. The journal announced the termination, and then got blow-back and apparently realized they had accidentally revealed their very unscientific philosophy where the IPCC = God, and one of the ten commandments was that it shall not be doubted. The publishers (“not-so-Copernicus“) belatedly added, without any detail, that the 14 papers published by 19 scientists in one special edition had reviewed each others work, and therefore should not have been published. The only “error” listed was to disagree with the IPCC. This is a scandal.
I’ve been an editor of a scientific journal, and have reviewed papers for several journals. No, I didn’t get paid. Reviewing is “paying my dues,” or “paying forward.” I review papers to help maintain the quality of things published in the journals.
Yes, I’ve seen “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” reviewing, but it’s rare in most fields. We know from “Climategate” that it’s almost universal among the “warmists.” The problem again is not who is reviewing, but are they doing a good job? I used to get a lot of heavily mathematical papers because the editors knew I’d go through the derivations line by line. That’s the way to maintain quality.
in order to have the credibility from the people,
they would have to count the climate changes from the begining of the earth sea and atmosphere
surounding it,
than add to it the diversity of the SUN’S BEHAVIOR, ON A XTIME VALUE,
because hey, they all are in the game, of climate change,
and or they won’t bother, or they don’t want to dig, just in case they lose face and money allocated for their unreliable research,
THE SAME RESEARCH OF WHEN THEY BEGUN,