[ethanbond]

> Publications should be responsible for the veracity of the content they publish

That is ridiculous and betrays a serious misunderstanding of the role of publications. The publications are a forum for discussion. People say incorrect things in discussions all the time, and they can’t be corrected until they’ve been said. Where do you propose they get said? How do you propose the publication “know” what’s true or not? There’s no way to do it, otherwise why would you be publishing what you’re publishing? The whole point is that people don’t already know what you’re telling them.

Scientific publishing is super broken in many ways but this is a terrible solution.

[andrewflnr]

And yet, they do try to reject papers for various issues that at least approximate veracity. No journal will accept a paper proposing a perpetual motion machine. What is that but a veracity check? What is peer review? Glorified spellcheck? No, we expect publishers to at least catch the obvious stuff.

If you design a publisher around the idea that it truly has no responsibility for veracity, then you get... Arxiv. In that scenario traditional publishers truly provide no value.

[ethanbond]

Yes it is glorified spellcheck. They’re checking your methods. If you claim to have built a perpetual motion machine they almost certainly will not reject your paper on the basis that “perpetual motion machines are impossible,” but on the basis that your methodology [almost certainly] has an error.

[andrewflnr]

"Your methodology probably has an error [because you got the wrong answer]" is not meaningfully different from "we're rejecting your paper because it's false". My point stands.

Ed: your other comment about how publishers used to just be mailing lists is actually kind of funny in how it proves my point. If we wanted publishing to just be a mailing list... we can just have a mailing list. Or use Arxiv. But today's publishers have to at least pretend to do better than that, which they mostly do by supposedly filtering papers on quality, which in turn is, you guessed it, 80% veracity checks (oh, and also increasing the right people's citation counts).

[ethanbond]

Well yeah when you add stuff I didn’t say, it does sound ridiculous.

I didn’t say they would reject it based on the result and presuming an error. They would find and reject the error (or on the basis of a million far more superficial issues which are actual good targets for reforming scientific publishing).

[andrewflnr]

What did I add that's meaningfully different from what you said, i.e. in terms of outcome?

Ed: ok, I think I get it, you mean they'll somehow identify a specific method error, and if they can't then they'll... Just accept it? I simply don't believe that. I think the journal both should and actually will reject papers that violate the second law of thermodynamics without finding a specific methodological flaw.

[superb_dev]

If the paper is completely methodologically sound and the only problem is that it violates the second law of thermodynamics, then we need to take another look at the second law of thermodynamics

[ethanbond]

Remarkable you can have this opinion about what should happen and then one comment later run into the exact reason that this is a terrible idea.

Failing to find an error doesn’t mean the paper is true. Correct! That’s why passing peer review isn’t and cannot be a badge of truthfulness.

[chaxor]

That seems more like what blogs and posts are for, not academic journals. Unfortunately things have degraded so much that there is very little difference between a blog and a research article, but there should be a very large distinction.

[ethanbond]

No, this is what journals are and always have been. Historically they were much looser even. Essentially just mailing lists of interested parties.