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Posted by: belleraphon1 Aug 28 2009, 11:34 AM

All....

This is from Mike Brown's Planets blog. Is was pointed out to the cassinihuygens yahoo group by Sean Mac.

Fog at Titan's south pole .......

http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2009/08/fog-titan-titan-fog-and-peer-review.html

Paper describing the results and an invitation from Mike brown...
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/papers/ps/fog_pp.pdf

"Peer review, as implemented in the current world of over-stressed astronomers, has some serious flaws, though."

"There has been much talk recently about all of this, and even some interesting experiments done by scientific journals. I thought I would try an experiment of my own here. It goes like this: feel free to provide a review of my paper!"

I thought there are some folks on this forum that would love to jump on this invitation!!!!

Go for it.

Craig

Posted by: remcook Aug 28 2009, 12:59 PM

If he has a problem with there being only one reviewer, then why submit it to Astrophysical Journal Letters? There are plenty of journals that have two or three reviewers. Generally, they tend to disagree. I'm also puzzled that astronomy journals have only reviewer.... Interesting experiment nevertheless.

Posted by: djellison Aug 28 2009, 02:35 PM

Reading his twitter feed, it sounds like no one else wanted to publish the paper.

Posted by: ngunn Aug 28 2009, 03:22 PM

There seems to be a pattern here. Recall this from last year:
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2008/09/joys-of-rejection-and-lake-effect.html

Posted by: DFortes Aug 28 2009, 05:37 PM

Every now and again you'll have a paper where one of the reviewers just doesn't send any comments back, and the editor has to rely on one of the referees. I imagine in my case, the errant reviewer has died laughing, or choked on his or her own spleen. Reading my work can be a bit like having Vogon poetry read to you... and that's *me* saying that...
And then there are the journals that ask for six or nine (yes, nine) reviewers names. I suppose the man / woman who makes tea in the editorial office gets to pick names out of a hat.

But reviewing is a bit farcical sometimes. If you ever read stuff that gets published and think, 'this is drivel' you should see some of it at the review stage.

Posted by: stevesliva Aug 28 2009, 06:53 PM

As long as it is declarative and not written entirely in some awful passive voice (It was decided that this paper was to be written), anything is tolerable. It's not the content that gets you, it's the grammar. It's funny how often people who want to describe neuter things that are or were think that those forms of to be are just not rhethorically flourishey enough.

An engineering colleague of mine threw a paper section at me to critique, I think for content, but the whole damn thing was written in third person past tense passive voice. gaaarg. We can't even conjugate abstracts correctly, it seems:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1375005
"Hardware results was presented."

Posted by: Greg Hullender Aug 29 2009, 12:31 AM

Really? I'd rather read an awkwardly-written paper that presented an exciting result than a beautifully-written one that presented a weak result. Anyone can clean up the style, but lack of legitimate content can't be fixed. In my experience, if I can't understand a paper it's almost always because I lack enough background knowledge -- not because of grammar or style problems.

--Greg