Moreover:
1. No lawsuit is won when the inferior part is not the cause of the failure. even better, no litigation is successful if a part is inferior but there has been no failure! In other words, you will need to show a paper is flawed, and THEN you can possibly refer to the fraudulent paper its cites as a cause,

2. You’re asking the general public, of which the vast majority have no way of understanding what is going on, to determine who is biased. Good luck with that popularity contest, which will be completely governed by vested interest. I’m definitely not interested in that.

3. So, you are not willing to pay for the extra effort it takes to collect the data in one place, and make it accessible. You are also aware that those mail servers are regularly replaced and emptied (oops, there goes the data) ?

4. You are clearly not aware what you are asking for, since a lot of ‘data’ is not tangible in the sense that it can be entered into an excel worksheet. Nor does that prevent fraud in any way! Remember that many frauds involve manipulation of data, so who will be there to check that a researcher really puts the raw data in? And what exactly IS raw data? Is it the detector voltage of my instrument when I collect a spectrum, or am I allowed to show the absorbance (which involves a calculation) ?

5. Yes, to handle data you need higher skills in that area. Do you think you can handle all forms of statistics? If so, remember that 99,9% of the general public does not. In this case my example was one to live bacteria (not viruses), where the ‘data’ is the bacteria. No strawmen there at all, the data is directly in the bacteria, unless you blindly believe the authors when they report number of bacteria and growth rate. In that case the latter is the data, and you’ll need an understanding of how bacteria grow to understand whether the observed curves make any sense.

Finally, you still have not told me what the alternative to peer review is. You propose some changes (release all data!), without realising that it is not that easy, You also propose that the general public is allowed to decide, but you do not describe how this would have to work in practice. You also do not explain how this would counter the frauds in the learning community.

Now, as to your suggestion on the involvement of the general public: no one prevents anyone from reviewing scientific papers! Your demand is not prevented by anyone to start with! But if you think that review is more objective, I think you are the one in the middle of the road. There are several fields of science where the results are not exactly to the liking of vested interests, and where you frequently see ‘reviews’ of scientific papers that are clearly ideologically biased. There’s a good chance Richard Lenski could not have published his work on bacterial evolution if he had been required to have his work reviewed by the general US public!

Regarding sharing data: are you willing to give me 50,000 dollar a year, so my group can put all raw data in publishable format? I need the money to maintain the data server and pay for the data traffic, and pay someone to make the raw data, like spectra, readable and understandable for everyone. That’s just my group, so please do set aside another few billions for all scientific groups around the world.

And is it OK for me to deny to give you data that I received from someone else with the explicit or implicit request not to share with others without prior consent. If yes, you may want to rethink your reference to ‘the global warming scientists’…

And while you are at it, I suggest you read Lenski’s second e-mail to Andy Schlafly, pointing out that sharing of certain ‘data’ requires the recipient to have certain skills, or otherwise that sharing would be outright dangerous. Or are living bacteria suddenly no longer “raw data”?

I also think you should reconsider that supposed objectivity of your building inspector, judge, or civilian review boards compared to the peer reviewer of scientific papers. You will find that building inspectors often have been employed or otherwise worked with construction companies (sometimes they still do). Judges in several fields have been lawyers previously, defending the same type of people whose case they are now to judge. In civilian review boards you will frequently find that they actually have professional investigators (who are likely to have some type of prior experience in the field).

A final request: since you are so negative about peer review, can you suggest an alternative?

The guilty by association example you got wrong, too: the way you describe how papers should be dismissed if they cite a paper in which a fraudulent issue is present is the same as you being investigated by the police if your colleague has committed tax fraud, or stole something from a store. Unless there are indications you were involved (your colleague says you helped him file the taxes, or you drove him to the store), there isn’t a single police officer who would even consider going after you, too. And be happy, or you’d be under consistent scrutiny by the police, because there is very likely at least one person in your immediate vicinity (colleague, friend, family) who has done something bad, even if it is only speeding.

Also remember that many of the citations in papers are meant to put one’s research into perspective. Unless that fraudulent paper is the all-defining perspective, or the main source of your data, citing a fraudulent paper is unlikely to have an impact on your own paper. There will even be cases where your paper is actually strengthened by the paper you cited being fraudulent, e.g. when it contradicts your own findings. I have also cited heavily flawed papers, specifically because they were flawed. In some cases there may well be some data manipulation in those papers, too. In your analogy, my paper is now to be dismissed! As General McAuliffe said: NUTS!

You will also find that few scientists have problems with their papers being scrutinised by others that may not be experts in the field. The problems start when this scrutiny is biased, with the person doing the analysis insufficiently aware of the facts and the context.

And please get off your high horse: all scientists live in society, universities are not Ivory Towers, at least not more than any other part of society. People with large egos you will also find everywhere.

you also make the illogica, “guilt by association” argument. if a business associate of mine were to get arrested for fraud/theft and we have worked on project together the police would be obligated to look at my records and all the joint projects as well, that is not paranoia but a logical extention of the fraud/theft. and in the real world that is how it does work.

in a building if one of the supporting beams is substandard, weak or made from inferior steel the building process must stop and the beam replaced or the build, when completed will have issues and could fail, the same applies to your 30 cite paper, if one of your 30 cites is inferior than the whole paper will fail.

i will give you an example of the bias in the peer review process, you work in the life sciences, and if i were to present a creationism paper you might object to the merits (no matter how valid the work is) of it out of hand (and no i am not a creationist) based on your training and your bias. Like wise a paper supporting evolution you would not look at as criticial as the creationism paper. i will repeat myself I AM NOT A CREATIONIST. the issues is that the peer review process comes with built in biases that can not be policed internally but needs someone from the outside to look at all the thousands of papers we produce each year (the trouble is we produce so many papers that are only good as bird cage liners, i have seen many business papers out of date due to new laws, computers or practices, before the research work was finished and the revisions to the paper out of data before they were done as well).

all sites like “retration watch” is asking is that the general public be allowed to look at the work of experts and make comments about it and conduct fact checks independent of our learning community. i know it is kind of scary for you because you have lived in the cloistered world of colleges and universities for so long, but there is a real world out here that is becoming increasing sceptical of all scientific work before we lose our supporters, ceditability as we have more stories of fraud/theft we must open up the process or a least take the first step, i know your egos (and boy do some of you have hugh egos) will get bruised, but we will be better off in the end.