Prometheus- Open Access Research Database Project: Creating an open source database for research and review

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-26

Summary:

I need help creating a website where researchers can submit their published papers or working manuscripts for critique. It’ll need to allow other scientists to point out flaws with the study design and report if they were able to replicate the experiment.  The current model for research is severely flawed. There is no system in place to report flawed research articles. As a result, there is almost no way to know if a research paper is flawed except for word of mouth in the research community. The journals themselves do not guarantee the quality of the research because it is ‘peer reviewed’ by other scientists who aren’t paid.  It may be surprising to people, but most of the research articles that are published have a lot of problems with them. That’s because most researchers are judged based on the quantity of published articles rather than the quality of those papers. So a lot of the papers are junk for the most part if the journal has low standards.  Also the journals are usually biased towards studies reporting significant effects since null findings aren’t as interesting. This might not seem like a big deal, but reporting null findings can save a lot of money,time, and effort since we know what doesn’t work.  Finally, the system is not fair. Scientists have to pay huge amounts of money to research journals to accept their papers and then have to pay the same journals more money to have access to them. The worst part about this system is that the research is funded mostly by taxpayers. Yet we need to pay outrageous subscription fees to journals such as Elsevier or Wiley to have access to research we paid for.  I don't know anything about programming or coding so any help would be greatly appreciated. I know I am out of my depth, but I don't think it’s going to be fixed anytime soon unless we do something about it.”

Link:

http://rumplogos.blogspot.com/2012/08/creating-open-source-database-for.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.peer_review oa.impact oa.quality oa.prestige oa.prices oa.wiley

Date tagged:

08/26/2012, 10:38

Date published:

08/26/2012, 06:38