[nextos]

EMBL-EBI and others had some RDF-related effort to provide machine readable abstracts, which I thought was a really cool idea.

IMHO, the biggest problem with papers is politics and reviews. In many top journals like Nature there's no double-blind review (actually in Nature it's now optional but big groups never use it). And even if there was double-blind review, referees have no skin in the game. So the usual outcome is to get reviewed by a big name in your field, who is actually interested in controlling research trends and killing "competitors".

This is hindering progress and hurting new ideas. For example, proponents of Alzheimer's disease being caused by an infection or dysbiosis have had a hard time to do research, get grants and publish articles during the last 2 decades. Despite their theory is able to explain the etiology quite well, unlike competing alternatives.

Another problem is that to publish in good journals you need cool results. Cool results are rare, but Nature, Science, Cell et al. are full of articles every month. So, most groups are overselling and misreporting things. Research fraud, p-value hacking and data manipulation are really common.

[tasogare]

> referees have no skin in the game

That's a big problem. I just got a paper rejected. Reviewer 1 was just focalized on a single detail I mentioned somewhere, not central at all in the paper yet is basing most on this criticism around that. Reviewer 2 has difficulty understanding a table containing 2 columns and 3 rows, and what means N, V, ADJ and ADV in a paper about dictionary (not to mention the same abbreviation was used just before, and used a plain words numerous times in multiple paragraphs). Reviewer 3 is the only one saying a remotely nice thing and who seems to have grasped what the paper is about. There is of course some valid criticism raised in the reviews, but half of it is bullshit that would be dispelled in a more interactive process or/and if reviewers had incentives to actually put a minimal effort to understand the paper.

[ansgri]

It’s not really possible to conduct double-blind reviews in most cases: authors or at least the group can often be easily guessed from the list of references, “in our previous work…”, and research domain and approach in general.

[jamessb]

Sensible anonymisation policies prevent people from referring to "our previous work" in submissions - e.g., the policy for CHI [1] states:

> We do expect that authors leave citations to their previous work unanonymized so that reviewers can ensure that all previous research has been taken into account by the authors. However, authors are required to cite their own work in the third person, e.g., avoid “As described in our previous work [10], … ” and use instead “As described by [10], …”

However, it is true that things like choice of research questions, approach, and equipment used can be quite suggestive of the authors' identity.

[1]: https://chi2020.acm.org/authors/papers/chi-anonymisation-pol...