The editorial in the July 24 issue of Science1 informed me with a report by the Nanional Academies of the US, Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age. I can obtain full text of the report for free because I’m a reader from developing country. But I only had time to read the summary section.
The report gives several recommendations to different roles in the modern scientific infrastructure. Two main ideas shared by these recommendations is that to use digital technology to fight digital frauds, and that higher transparency of both the research and peer review process is needed. However, the recommendations also show a layered strategy to fight digital frauds, from individual researchers, institutes to journals and stakeholders. Whereas indeed no single layer of effort can stop the scientific frauds once and for all, neither can the sum of them cover up the whole process, because these layers only represent the “production” part in the industry of science research. In the “mass production” age of science research, to discover with only occasional defective products cannot be successful without the help of “consumers’” feedback, which means the whole groupof readers of the research report. The wholeness should be most ensured because we are talking about very rare cases which may affect a small number of people. We are less probable to discover them if we only receive part of the report from the consumers.
The current assembly line from researchers to journals is quite perfect already, in ensuring a high percentage of qualified product of research. To discover still very rare cases of frauds, two or three reviewers invited by a journal and before publication is obviously ineffective and insufficient. The idea of “using digital technology to fight digital frauds”, or better put, "using IT (Information Technologies) to fight IF (Information Frauds, and also, maybe cleverer, Impact Factor), applies here. To break the space limit of printed journals so that all rather then essential research data are avaialable to the public rather than the subscribers, we have to embrace the Internet which provides us with unlimited storage space, and also allow for real open access. We also need to encourage the role of Web 2.0 activities like blogs and social network the accelerate the discovery of occasional faults and frauds in the ocean of published papers.
The recently response in the blogosphere to the JACS paper which describe the oxidative property of NaH best exemplified the above idea, although in this specific case there need not be a scientific frauds.
1 Kleppner, D., & Sharp, P. (2009). Research Data in the Digital Age Science, 325 (5939), 368-368 DOI: 10.1126/science.1178927
