New wave of online peer review and discussion tools frightens some scientists

Sites like Publons and PubPeer hope to quicken the pace of scientific conversation.

Publons

Earlier this year, I wrote a story about a new HIV/Aids detection kit that was under development. Since that time, the same group has published two more papers on the same topic, but questions are starting to be asked about the original research. The questions were so simple that I was pretty embarrassed I didn't spot the problems on my own.

But I wouldn't have gotten even that far were it not for the new directions that peer review and social media are taking science. I was alerted to the problems by twitter user @DaveFernig, pointing me to a discussion about the paper on PubPeer.

Before getting to that, let's recap what impressed me about the HIV detection paper. It achieved a couple of things that made it stand out from a veritable truckload of similar proof-of-principle experiments. The test was very sensitive—so sensitive that it could detect viral loads below that of the standard test and may even reach single molecule sensitivity. When someone uses single-molecule sensitivity, I tend to get all hot and bothered and all my critical thinking faculties vanish for a while.