[Coral-List] Trust peer-reviewed articles rather than the press

[Magnus Johnson]

I wish they were all open access but the interested member of the public can email the authors directly and request a pdf - most will be only too happy to respond.  We all love it when people are interested in our work.

As for:

> Richard Dunne should trust peer-reviewed articles rather than the press, 
> especially newspapers which have a poor scientific record.

I'm afraid that on many occasions "top" peer reviewed journals do not have a great track record.  As Howard Browman rightly points out, it is really difficult to get a "boring" result published in a top journal which means that we are driven towards interesting/exciting results. that may hide the true and less sellable story.  In the Pharma industry this is having disastrous consequences (see Ben Goldacre's books, Bad Science and Big Pharma for lots of evidence).  I think other areas of science are probably just as bad.

We need people who are willing to be critical of received wisdom - that's where progress can be made and I welcome Howard Browman's special volume.  I will read papers from it with as critical an eye as I would any other volume.  The OA story doesn't just have two sides.

If you want to see a great example of scientists swimming against the flow of detritus pumped out by magpie like scientists promoting stories that sell to the peanut gallery and big foundations rather than science take a look at www.cfooduw.org

I wish there were similar sites for Climate change (i.e. sites by serious scientists sensibly critiquing science, rather than lunatic climate change deniers spouting ill informed opinion) and all other areas of science including coral reef ecology.  But no one wants to fund that sort of work.

cheers, Magnus
________________________________________
From: Nick Wehner [nwehner at marineaffairs.org]
Sent: 04 March 2016 18:55
To: Coral List
Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Trust peer-reviewed articles rather than the press

Please do keep in mind, that the vast majority of papers in this issue are not Open Access. In fact, of the 45 papers in this special issue, only 9 are available for free. At $40 per paper, it would cost $1,440 for just one person to read this special issue.

The idea, therefore, that the “general public” should only trust peer-reviewed publications is a non-starter. If the general public won’t even pay for newspapers anymore, do you really expect them to pay $40 for a single peer-reviewed paper?

Cheers,
-Nick

Nick Wehner
Project Manager, OpenChannels
Marine Affairs Research and Education (MARE)
http://openchannels.org | http://marinedebris.info | http://marineaffairs.org
nwehner at marineaffairs.org

> On Mar 4, 2016, at 9:15 AM, Jean-Pierre Gattuso <gattuso2 at obs-vlfr.fr> wrote:
>
> Coral-listers,
>
> Richard Dunne should trust peer-reviewed articles rather than the press,
> especially newspapers which have a poor scientific record.
>
> climatefeedback.org has analysed Ben Webster’s article “Scientists
> are exaggerating carbon threat to marine life” in The Times. It
> estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘very low’. The
> analysis should be published later today. I will send the link when it
> will become available.
>
> Also note that the scientist quoted in this article, Howard Browman,
> claims that Webster quoted him in a misleading way. Finally, the issue
> discussed, ocean acidification, is distinct from “global warming”.
> Both just share the same cause (the rise in atmospheric CO2).
>
> ---------------------------------------------
> Jean-Pierre Gattuso | http://www.obs-vlfr.fr/~gattuso
> _______________________________________________
> Coral-List mailing list
> Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list

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