Defenders of the traditional publishing model for medicine say that health-related claims need to be vetted by a referee process. But there are heavy costs. In quantum information, one might know the proof of a theorem (e.g. the Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem) for years without publishing it. But one would rarely publish using data that is itself secret. Unfortunately, this is the norm in public health. It’s ironic that the solution to the 100-year-old Poincaré conjecture was posted on arxiv.org and rapidly verified, while research on fast-moving epidemics like H5N1 (bird flu) is
delayed so that scientists who control grants can establish priority.
All this is old news. But what I hadn’t realized is that the rest of science needs not only arxiv.org, but also scirate.com. Here is a recent and amazing, but disturbingly common, example of scientific fraud. A series of papers were published with seemingly impressive results, huge and expensive clinical trials were planned based on these papers, while other researchers were privately having trouble replicating the results, or even making sense of the plots. But when they raised their concerns, here’s what happened (emphasis added):
In light of all this, the NCI expressed its concern about what was going on to Duke University’s administrators. In October 2009, officials from the university arranged for an external review of the work of Dr Potti and Dr Nevins, and temporarily halted the three trials. The review committee, however, had access only to material supplied by the researchers themselves, and was not presented with either the NCI’s exact concerns or the problems discovered by the team at the Anderson centre. The committee found no problems, and the three trials began enrolling patients again in February 2010.
As with the Schön affair, there were almost comically many lies, including a fake “Rhodes scholarship in Australia” (which you haven’t heard of because it doesn’t exist) on one of the researcher’s CVs. But what if they lied only slightly more cautiously?
By contrast, with scirate.com, refutations of mistaken papers can be quickly crowdsourced. If you know non-quantum scientists, go forth and spread the open-science gospel!
. I’m probably just suffering from a bout of dewy eyed pastoralism, but when was the last time a book which was readable by the general public was also a major work of science? (
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