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Publishers trial paying peer reviewers – what did they find?

(www.nature.com)
31 points xqcgrek2 | 1 comments | 29 Mar 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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withinboredom ◴[02 Apr 25 18:03 UTC] No.43559461[source]▶
There's this guy I usually have on in the background on youtube who replicates chemistry experiments -- or attempts to. It's pretty rare to see him find a paper that doesn't exaggerate yields or go into enough details, and he has to guess things.
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datadrivenangel ◴[02 Apr 25 18:11 UTC] No.43559567[source]▶
You don't exaggerate yields, you just publish the best one you get out of a dozen attempts. Chemistry is messy.
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thyristan ◴[02 Apr 25 19:22 UTC] No.43560495[source]▶
That, in science, is called "lying".

Either you publish the range of results, the average plus standard deviation or average plus standard deviation of a subset with the exclusion criteria and exclusion range. Picking a result is a lie, plain and simple, and messiness is not an excuse.

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1. passwordoops ◴[02 Apr 25 19:43 UTC] No.43560703{3}[source]▶
Hence the crisis we have in science today.

As an aside, I'm working at a QC chem lab now, with results that have a direct impact on revenue calculations for clients. Therefore the reports go to accountants, therefore error bars dont't exist. We recently had a case where we reported 41.7 when the client expected 42.0 on a method that's +/- 1.5... They insisted we remeasure because our result was "impossible" The repeat gave 42.1, and the client was happy to be charged twice