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There is, it’s true, pressure on the peer-review system, with submission volumes rising continuously and faster than the pool of available reviewers (and Associate Editors). Unreasonable expectations about the speed of the process make this pressure worse.
"If MDPI were a music major, this strategy would amount to, first, putting in effort to sign a dozen of very popular bands, and then, once the reputation is in place ask their friends (or indeed anyone with a guitar) to produce more records under the name of the rock stars, for a low fee. Musicians of all levels jumped in. U2 this year released one album, but there are 400 invited bands releasing their albums under the U2 franchise."
- Paolo Crosetto
Dunning-Kruger effect: It's not a disease, syndrome or mental illness; it is present in everybody to some extent, and it's been around as long as human cognition.
"The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries. To summarize, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying."
-Martin A Schwartz
A manuscript can be assigned to an editor who’s away; a reviewer can agree to review and then disappear; an editor can get behind and let the notification that your MS is ready for decision slip down their email inbox until it’s no longer in everyday view. These things happen much less frequently than they used to, with most journals using tracking systems with plenty of automated checks and reminders, but they happen nonetheless. There’s someone in the journal office (usually a “managing editor” or a managing editor’s assistant) whose job it is to check on such things, once alerted to the possibility, and you aren’t doing anything inappropriate by asking (politely) for a check to be made.
"The two terms are often conflated and, incorrectly, used interchangeably, particularly by marketing departments that want to make their technology sound sophisticated. In fact, artificial intelligence and machine learning are very different things, with very different implications for what computers can do and how they interact with us. "
"It is the science that the President Trump abandoned in his deeply troubling decision."
"Today, 95 million farmers are still uninsured and only 6% are voluntarily purchasing coverage. Insurance payouts for crop damage are often delayed by a year, and are left subject to the whims of local insurance officers."
"New snow is like sunscreen for glaciers as it reflects the sun’s energy with high efficiency compared to bare glacial ice. "
"Governments need to assign liabilities to companies that write insecure software that harms people, and possibly even issue and enforce regulations that require companies to maintain software systems throughout their life cycle."
"Performance indicators invites strong opinions that are indeed important, but largely tangential, to the metrics themselves, such as their misuse, abuse, social, cultural, and political implications."
"Over 80 forms for 'proper reference formatting' – should convince us that things have gone badly wrong in science communication, where the layout of the reference is more important than the reference itself."
"Researchers reap more rewards for publishing flashy papers than for doing solid work, and the two do not always align."
"Probable and highly likely, these two terms seem mostly interchangeable, but each individual’s interpretation is actually highly subjective. That means that when stakes are high, such as for the intelligence community or for high-ranking government officials, a slight misinterpretation in the meaning of these phrases could be a matter of life and death."
"India does need a Geospatial Information Act, but it has to be an enabling and encouraging Act that makes for faster and better implementation of programmes, not a regressive and punitive Act as the proposed one."
"Something perceived as funny when spoken may come across very differently when written. When in doubt, leave it out."
"The effect of long-term operation of Sci-Hub will be that publishers change their publishing models to support Open Access, because closed access will make no sense anymore."
- Alexandra Elbakyan
"The temptation to p hack is one of the big disadvantages of relying on p values. Another is that the p<.05 criterion encourages black-and-white thinking: an effect is either statistically significant or it isn't, which sounds rather like saying an effect exists or it doesn't."
“Although farmers are aware of the adverse affects of crop burning, they rely on it due to the lack of economically viable and acceptable machinery and alternatives to dispose of residue.”
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