[wosk]

Tangentially related, a glimpse into academia.

The paper[1] was contributed in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PNAS is a very well regarded, and high impact journal.

Members of National Academy of Science, usually proeminent professors, have the possibility to "contribute" their work. They can choose reviewers, and the paper will be accepted by the editors (an important step for such a journal). When you are in this position, finding reviewers that will not reject you is really easy: academia is a small world with a few really powerful individuals.

I think the reason for this is that NAS members performs a lot of editorial works for the Academy, and they are very good scientist hence their contribution should be valued, and fast.

This has been the source of a lot of outrage (I was maintaining a list but I can't find it). Some NAS members used this process to rapidly publish when timing was important (such as covid-19 research), scooping the work of researchers that don't have such a convenient outlet. It is especially problematic when a professor is a member of the NAS for his work in some field, but uses "contributed" papers to push mediocre or naive work in another field (s)he doesn't know at all (such as physicist in epidemiological modeling). A lot of very bad quality work ended up in the news because it was in PNAS.

To mitigate these issues, I think it's now limited to two papers per year. Moreover, the paper mentions "contributed by" and the name of the reviewers. But if you go and check some google scholar page, some people made a career out of it. For any idea, you get an audience and tons of credibility for free.

[1]: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2105968118

[data_acquired]

Yeah, this is a well-known controversial aspect of PNAS publishing. However, not all uses of this track of publication is necessarily nefarious. See this for instance -- https://www.nature.com/news/scientific-publishing-the-inside... . I was also told that use of this track is some times for very mundane reasons too --- like a professor trying to help a struggling grad student satisfy PhD requirements such as needing X number of papers to graduate. More often than not, good ideas do get held up in other journals for all kinds of non-scientific reasons. I've certainly not seen too many examples of overly-erroneous science in this track either, at least in genomics.

I do thoroughly understand your concerns and distaste here that this allows prominent academics to push their (possibly incorrect) views/results on something far outside their expertise. I would love if PNAS publishes the peer reviews for papers such as these that pertain to ongoing health crises (eLife makes peer reviews public, but keeps the reviewers' identity anonymous).

[wosk]

This came to my mind as a recent outrage in genomics[1].

Indeed there are some wonderful contributed papers and some members use it responsibly. I also concur with with everything you said, just adding that even in laudable cases (struggling grad, ...), there is some injustice and it'll always be misleading.

Thanks for the precisions and the mention of eLife.

[1] https://twitter.com/arambaut/status/1248387395201847296?s=19

[data_acquired]

Wow, didn't know about this case.

[em500]

I can't assess the quality of PNAS, but the one thing I remember about it is that Columbia statistics prof Andrew Gelman disses them all the time for peddling pseudo-science based mostly on junk statistics[1]. He paints it as basically a science oriented clickbait tabloid.

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=PNAS, https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-p...

[COGlory]

PNAS has garnered itself a nickname among my peers, for these exact reasons. The worst is the sponsored paper section. I have encountered some real garbage in PNAS papers.

However, I've also encountered real garbage in other respected journals, like Nucleic Acid Research. Journals are a business, and most of them go after what's catchy.