To: Retort
From: IC
[This letter from Ignacio - no stranger himself to the workings of Nature - written to the indomitable Tad Patzek, late of Berkeley and now professor of petroleum and geosystems engineering in Texas, reveals the sinister new world of virtual peer-preview, casting Monsanto's gadfly into scientific limbo. IB]
From: Ignacio Chapela, Berkeley, California
Re: The Censorship of Peer-Preview
Dear Tad,
I started writing this as a short acknowledgment and condolence message for not having your most interesting paper published by the Nature publishing group--or at least not quite completely published. Showing with exquisite detail that non-industrial agriculture does in fact work more efficiently than the system in place today, your paper should have run the cover of Nature for the world to see and learn. Now it will be stuck forever in this most unusual electronic limbo created by the Nature Publishing Group. What a better way to shut the door on publications -and at the same time claim first dibs on the materials? And to do so through the most cruel and unusual application of the peer-review concept?
I was simply stunned for a couple of days by what you are documenting here about the scientific publishing world with this new "peer"-review system. And so I decided to copy a few others on my response. I hope you do not mind. For the sake of those who do not have the privilege of an account with Nature, I am attaching a tiff file with a screenshot of the object in question. The curious neologism "Precedings" should not be confused with "Proceedings".
These days it is difficult to be impressed, let alone shocked, by the innumerable cases of censorship, group-think and plain bullying taking place in the so-called scientific community (something that is definitely neither). But the publish-by-vote system established by Nature Precedings is something that I never imagined could happen - I should have trusted the Macmillan stable to come up with some scheme like this, and the Georg vonHoltzbrinck brains to embrace it.
I did not know of this way of publishing, Tad. A paper gets published or rejected based on an anonymous popularity vote-count? On the face of it, this is to scientific censorship --already bad enough with the "peer"-review system as it was-- what unmanned bomber drones are to warfare: an unaccountable, invisible, no-pain (because no pain detected) medium to convey selective destruction and maintain a good trim on any bushy outgrowth from the neat conforming hedges. Collateral casualties be damned.
But it is much worse in its actual embodiment at Nature, because the system seems completely rigged to be much worse than a beauty contest on Facebook. I tried to register a vote on your behalf, and even though I could get to read the document through our library's very expensive account, I could not enter into the voting section because my individual email was not 'recognized'. I assume that I would need to be a private, personal account-payer to have the privilege of deciding whether your paper would be published or not. This really opens many more questions about the operation of this group-think exercise, all run under the remote and anonymous guidance of what Nature calls its "Curation Team" (which, they are careful to state, should not be taken to imply the papers are in any way "peer reviewed" - who are these curators-not-peers?), and driven by the anonymous "votes" of high-paying subscribers who may or may not be official scientists.
I must call your attention to Suzan Mazur's recent work documenting the business of the Scientific publication industry and the role of peer-review as an assumed standard of science. A recent interview with David Noble brings out much of what we should all be talking about:
http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur04052010.html
Suzan Mazur: The Peer-Review Figleaf
But reading through all this, one could be forgiven for asking: Is this really possibly happening? Could it possibly happen in the world of iPad and Space Station? My claim here is that irreversible damage is done on the very core of the scientific endeavour from within the Scientific Community itself, but we keep being reminded everywhere of two contradictory statements: first, the world as we enjoy it today is run by science (as in iPad and Space Station), with the implication that science must therefore be all powerful and indeed healthy. Second, however, we are told ad nauseam that science is under threat; not from within, but from outside, particularly in the bogey-men of Global Warming Denialists, Creationists, "Luddites", non-Darwinists, and many other hordes which I always imagine lurking in caves and forests of the mythical Colorado-Wyoming-Montana-Idaho country. And on both counts, Nature should stand as the mothership of the science revolution: this is the assumption that highschoolers, pundits and many within academia confusingly make. But there is indeed a contradiction that needs resolving here.
I have a working hypothesis about this: both thesis in the contradiction are false. The world is not run by science today, and the silly attacks of the dinosaur-riders (people who believe that humans could have had dinos as pets) run wild on the public mind precisely because science is in such a deep and possibly irretrievable decline. Looked in close detail, the advances in material, communication, computing and other fields are really engineering, not science; technical extensions, to undeniably marvel-like levels, of scientific work done already in the 19th Century and early part of the 20th. A recent visit to a high-tech, state-of-the-art Intensive Care unit in a hospital in Southern California showed me that no significant insight was really available to treat someone's heart beyond the plumbing and electrical engineering offshoots of knowledge already available a hundred years ago. Worse still, I found that knowledge seems to have been lost from what I had experienced as a young trainee in a cardiology hospital in 1970s Mexico City. The same or similar can be said of most other marvels presented as science on TV, and on science magazines like Nature. I know it will sound at first impudent, but I believe that it is because real science is so removed from social reality that the real hordes of destruction, quiet and powerful from within the scientific establishment, can get away with schemes like the one chewing away at your contribution.
How else could I explain what has become too much of a pattern, the systematic destruction of each sign of advance in knowledge on the questions of deepest importance to us today and to our children in the future? The list is long and difficult to collate, but take a sampler: Agriculture in a terminal crisis? Your paper, Tad, denied for lack of votes; many, many more not even enjoying that luck. Energy madness? Your papers again shunned to as invisible a place as possible, your proposals denied, your students coerced away. Many others could be named here. Transgenic disaster on the environment? Our papers and proposals denied and derided, my students' need for a minimum survival support trumped by those producing the first -and much trumpeted- towel-folding robot. Martha Crouch would have been the name to have rallied around years ago. Public health risks of transgenics? Names will include Seralini, Velot, Pusztai, Schubert, and many others. Pharmaceutical transgressions of public-health level? How many names would accompany Tyrone Hayes, David Healey and Peter Duesberg in that very long list? You take a question for which there is a burning need to produce real science and you will find a list of names of those who would have produced it, yet are in the cross-hairs not of cave-dwelling wackos, but of the crème-de-la-crème.
Maybe there is no burning need to produce real science. Maybe we are happy, continuing to make headlines and very good personal business by conflating science and technology, pilfering the name of science as a cover for plain and simple profit-making. Burning need or wishful desire? Is science, really, at all a necessity or more of a dream of the enlightment, unnecessary as all dreams are? You always struck me as someone caught in that dream, just as I am.
I write, and as the ideas roll names continue to insinuate themselves, up there in the recipient list of this email, building a sampler of what I think is a very large group of people who would like to see us live in consequence with the idea of real science. David Noble has a harsh and almost-true formulation when referring to those of us in the world of academia--he claims that we all belong in one of two groups: the bought or the broken. I recognize both in my own life and see how well this dualism works, except for one other category: the dream-catchers.
Please receive all my best, with thanks for your stubborn persistence and as always for your friendship,
Ignacio