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Originally Posted by zuluking
Publishing in a journal may not be what it's all cracked up to be.
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That's what people tend to say when they can't get published.
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I guess we've come full circle to what Climategate originally exposed.
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No we haven't. I gave you a list of peer-reviewed publications which you could not personally find fault with. You gave me one unpublished 'manuscript' that would have struggled for a passing grade in a first-year undergrad science course, and would not have gotten off the editor's desk if submitted for publication. Please compare what you gave me with almost any article in a high-level journal. Pick something outside of climate science to avoid bias if it makes you happy. There is no comparison.
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Regardless, climate scientists have a strong agenda for controlling publications.
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Proof? If you think Jones and Mann are out to get you, you submit to another journal and request that neither Jones nor Mann be considered as reviewers due to conflict of interest, then request someone you prefer. You can do this; it happens all the time. Simple. Good papers
eventually find a journal to accept them. Bad papers don't.
I'm not arguing that the peer-review system is flawless. It has some problems, and if you want I will happily discuss them with you. But it is still the best mechanism we have to determine whether or not science was properly done.
What am I supposed to respond to here?
The papers that Jones supposedly wanted to block from the IPCC AR? They got in anyway. Jones couldn't block them. So what's your point?
The comment from the journal re: harassment? It's true, authors are expected to provide raw data and reagents to fellow researchers wanted to replicate or build on specific studies. Nature's objection is that the likes of McIntyre et al., were not asking researchers for specific raw data sets to replicate specific analyses. They were flooding researchers (not just Jones, Mann, Briffa, but many more) with e-mails and FOI requests for indiscriminate massive tracts of data AND secondary analyses, which researchers are not obligated to provide. This is not in the spirit of the disclosure agreement. This is Nature's point and it's justified. If you want the raw data for Figure 4 in a 1996 paper to validate against your own data? Fine. Here ya go. You want all raw data and secondary analyses from a lab for years 1990-2000, so you can trawl it? That's insulting. Go away. See the difference? One of the contentious pieces of data - the location data for observation stations, has been publically available for three years (this is the problem when you pick a couple of lines out of 1000s of e-mails collected over a decade), and Nature has yet to receive an official complaint. So again, what's your point?
I'm not going to debate Jones et al., deleting e-mails etc. It's up to UEA and the other parties to determine whether any wrong-doing occured. My point is that even if Jones is guilty of scientific malpractice, which has yet to be proven, this does not invalidate the work of thousands of other independent scientists in the field. And if Jones has done something wrong, it will eventually found and corrected in the literature. This is the nature of science.
As far as the 'tarnish', hardly. Nature could walk away from ever publishing another climate science paper today (the bulk of it's impact comes from more medical and biological papers), and it would still be the world's pre-eminent journal. Nature only cares about top science, and no scientist is going to stop trying to get a Nature paper because of the link you posted.