Fake Science – Dog is editor of Peer review journal

peer review

Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … Read more

The quiet scientific revolution … bypassing Elsevier paywalls

A rather frustrating reality for those not lucky enough to have access via a University account are the barriers that exist around many scientific papers. You might perhaps be looking into some topic and would be interested in reading a peer-reviewed paper, but then when you search, you find that it sits behind a paywall put up by … Read more

“Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication

Indeed yes, a scientific paper entitled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. So the story here is that back in 2005 the authors,  David Mazières and Eddie Kohler, wrote this “paper” as a joke reply to the gazillions of emails they get from vanity journals. When solicited for a submission … Read more

Claims of Peer Review for Intelligent Design examined … and debunked

One of the many variations of modern creationism (the folks that claim ‘god did it’ is the right answer) is called “Intelligent Design”. There they attempt to refute evolution via the promotion of scientific evidence for an intelligent designer, and also attempt to make it more palatable by omitting all religious terms from what is essentially a religious claim. … Read more

Winston Hide, associate editor of Genomics, quits in protest

Winston Hide is the associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. There he specialises in the bioinformatics of genomic approaches to public health. He also used to be the associate editor of Genomics, a top tier peer-reviewed scientific journal, but no longer is because he … Read more