“…anyone considering publicizing a preprint have a responsibility.”
On my way to the airport, flying to B’ham, I read an older issue of Nature that contained this incredible editorial entry from Tom Sheldon Tim Horton, calling for regulation of preprints or worse, for the reason that journalists could misunderstand their contents and over-hype a minor or worse wrong claim. Taking as mistaken illustration the case of the Séralini et al. paper, about the Monsanto maize, which happened to be published under “embargo” conditions and reproduced in most media before a scientific storm erupted on the lack of significance of the samples. This call is unbelievably cheeky and downright absurd as it shifts the responsibility away from the journalists to the scientific community, throwing the “check your sources” principle of investigative journalism down the drain. As if the only reason for immediately publishing front-page discoveries is not to beat the competition and attract more readers…
The irony of seeing this piece in Nature is that a few pages later, there is a news entry on German and Swedish institutions breaking negotiations with Elsevier, as the publisher refuses to join a global package of open source publications. Nothing seems amiss about this nice aspect of scientific publishing with the author of this editorial, nor with the further reports of retraction of published paper in the same issue. Presumably because journalists have already moved to the next hot discovery by the time the retractions at last appear…! And to answer the final question of “Should all preprints be emblazoned with a warning aimed at journalists that work has not been peer reviewed?”, no, no, and no: preprints are not written for journalists or the general public. Unsurprisingly, the tribune induced outraged reactions from Nature readers.
Dreadful numbers that reveal the extent of the destruction in Gaza as listed by The Guardian
