Proposed set of rules for science journal editors

Eugen G Tarnow  October 27 2011 06:14:58 AM

Science editors like to set up ethical guidelines for authors in order to better cover their rears.  I have criticized these guidelines using surveys elsewhere and I just note that they are set up to pin responsibility for a paper on authors. When something goes wrong, the editors can then point to the authors and say it was their fault.  They are not set up to guard scientific originality: authors do not have to reference previous papers but they do have to list anybody who contributed work to the paper whether the particular contribution was scientifically original or not.  The lab director says - why don't you study X and if you study X and find something original the lab director has to be on the byline even if they just read the latest newspaper headline.  Editors do not enforce any of these rules so the byline credit can go to ghost authors and lab directors and if there is a problem at some point, it can all be pinned at the junior authors by the institutions representing the senior authors.  That's how unenforced guidelines run amok.  There are ways to follow the guidelines that allow authors to blackmail other authors!

But if we authors really want editors to be useful, they need guidelines.  Since they are not likely to self-police, here are my suggestions for such.  And I will be happy to get an NIH or NSF grant to help enforce those guidelines.

1.  Any referees that approve a paper have to be listed with the paper.  That way it is much less likely that referees who approve erroneous results can continue to approve erroneous results throughout their careers.
2.  Editors should not invite other editors as referees. This limits the diversity of the published science.  And it is kind of obvious - judges in our criminal system are not asked to be policemen at the same time.
3.  When a published article is found fraudulent, the editorial correspondence, a secret guarded by actual law, has to be immediately opened up to the public.
4.  All manuscript processing has to follow the same procedure and the particular procedure has to be published.  All published articles should have a summary of the procedure used including what the referee vote was and how many referees were elicited but did not respond in a timely fashion.
5.  Statistics for the manuscript process should be publically available including the mean and median times for a decision.
6.  A stated procedure has to exist that encourages reviewers to review on-time.  As it stands a competitor can hold up an author's paper by simply promising to review it and not doing it.
7. Experiments that reproduce or fail to reproduce an original published result should be automatically published online in the same journal as the original finding with links from the original report.  The original authors should have a right to comment on the new finding but not to be able to disapprove the new finding.  The journal editors should monitor any disputes and if the original finding is found incorrect, the novel findings should be published as regular articles and the original finding should be marked as incorrect.

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