Maintaining confidence in the reporting of scientific outputs

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1 Institute for Computational Medicine and Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
2 Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States
3 Carl R Wose Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, Illinois, United States
4 Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica António Xavier, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Oeiras, Portugal
5 National Institute of Agricultural Technology (IPAVE-CIAP-INTA), Córdoba, Argentina
6 Department of Bioengineering, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
7 Wellcome CRUK Gurdon Institute/Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
8 Department of Genomic Medicine, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, United States
9 Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Acton 2601, ACT, Australia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27098v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Science and Medical Education, Science Policy
Keywords
Preprints, Peer review, science communication, Open science, science journalism, academic publishing
Copyright
© 2018 Sarabipour et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Sarabipour S, Wissink EM, Burgess SJ, Hensel Z, Debat H, Emmott E, Akay A, Akdemir K, Schwessinger B. 2018. Maintaining confidence in the reporting of scientific outputs. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27098v1

Abstract

The timely and accurate dissemination of scientific discoveries is of utmost importance so that scientific knowledge can be advanced and applied to benefit the public. Scientists communicate amongst themselves at conferences, via journal articles, and, increasingly in the life sciences, in preprint manuscripts which have not been subject to peer review. Journalists translate new research into a language the public can understand, relying on both work presented in scientific forums and interviews with experts. Critically, scientists and journalists both share the ethical principle that publications should be rigorously sourced and fact-checked, with errors subject to publicized corrections. Here we respond to concerns raised about the impact of reporting on results that have not passed through peer review, calling for improved dialogue between scientists and journalists to maintain public trust in research and arguing that imposing limits is against the public interest.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.