Archive for peer review
peer review week 2025
Posted in Books, University life with tags academia, AI, artificial intelligence, Britain, ESRC-UKRI, peer review, peer review week, refereeing, Royal Society, scholarly publishing, UKRI on September 17, 2025 by xi'an
Bye’ ometrika
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags academic publisher, associate editor, Biometrika, Biometrika Trust, commercial editing, editor, large-scale statistical learning, peer review, refereeing, statistical inference, statistical machine learning, Statistics on February 1, 2024 by xi'an
validated by rigorous peer review with the author’s benefit
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags academic journals, peer review, predatory publishing, Pulsus, submission on April 28, 2023 by xi'an
The other day my co-authors and I received an email addressed to Dear Prof. Hugo Mariva (sic), offering to publish our importance Markov chain paper in the Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics which is very much likely a predatory journal, given the approximate English of the email, the journal acceptance window, its editorial board, and its publisher, which is associated with a myriad of journals in all fields and with amphed citation factors. (Plus the ultimate faux-pas of writing statistics with no upper case!) What I find fascinatingly scary or scarily fascinating is that we are in the final throes of submitting the paper to a respectable journal..!
We are glad to have established ourselves as a ruling Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. Aside from conceptual and theoretical, the journal encourages the use of mathematics in various other scientific fields, such as Algebra, Analysis, approximation theory, Geometry, statistics, Mathematical Biology, Topology, Number Theory, etc.
We reviewed your research profile and enjoyed your article entitled ” The Importance Markov Chain ” and their research by providing rapid publications within 30-40 days, validated by rigorous peer review with the author’s benefit.
Easy computation of the Bayes Factor
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags aplace’s irinciple of indifference, Bayes factor, Fisher information, Laplace approximation, peer review, referee on August 21, 2021 by xi'an“Choosing the ranges has been criticized as introducing subjectivity; however, the key point is that the ranges are given quantitatively and should be justified”
On arXiv, I came across a paper by physicists Dunstan, Crowne, and Drew, on computing the Bayes factor by linear regression. Paper that I found rather hard to read given that the method is never completely spelled out but rather described through some examples (or the captions of figures)… The magical formula (for the marginal likelihood)
where n is the parameter dimension, Cov is the Fisher information matrix, and the denominator the volume of a flat prior on an hypercube (!), seems to come for a Laplace approximation. But it depends rather crucially (!) on the choice of this volume. A severe drawback the authors evacuate with the above quote… And by using an example where the parameters have a similar meaning under both models. The following ones compare several dimensions of parameters without justifying (enough) the support of the corresponding priors. In addition, using a flat prior over the hypercube seems to clash with the existence of a (Fisher) correlation between the components. (To be completely open as to why I discuss this paper, I was asked to review the paper, which I declined.)
can you spare a dime? [or rather 113,900?]
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags academic journals, Iceland, India, króna, Nature, peer review, public funding, publishing fees, refereeing, Springer Nature on December 7, 2020 by xi'an
Just read the announcement in Nature of 24 November that
Publisher Springer Nature has announced how scientists can make their papers in its most selective titles free to read as soon as they are published.
which is presented as a great advance to make scientific papers available for all to read. The catch is that there is no free lunch, obviously, as the author(s) have to pay Springer a 1,514,324.68 krónur charge for immediate open access! The Nature article does mention the issue obviously, as this is such a huge amount of money that it makes publishing under such conditions inaccessible for all academics but those with sufficient funding grants. It also mentions an alternate scheme contemplated by some Nature outlets to introduce “a non-refundable fee of €2,190 to cover an editorial assessment and the peer-review process.” None of the fee going to reviewers, apparently. This “evolution” (?!) is driven by the EU Plan S for making scientific publications available to all, but it even more crucially calls for a radical reassessment of publishing policies for research that is publicly funded and publicly reviewed, then paid again by publicly funded libraries and institutions. Even more radical than India’s push for `One nation, one subscription’.
