[Vision2020] 4-4-18: GISS Director Gavin Schmidt on Scientific Publishing & Peer Review:

Tue Apr 10 21:47:59 PDT 2018

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
---------------------------------------

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/04/harde-times/#more-21237
Harde Times
Filed under:

   - Carbon cycle
   <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/carbon-cycle/>
   - Climate Science
   <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/>
   - Scientific practice
   <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/scientific-practice/>
   - skeptics
   <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/skeptics/>

— gavin @ 4 April 2018

Readers may recall a post a year ago about a nonsense paper
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/02/something-harde-to-believe/>
by Hermann Harde
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/04/harde-times/#ITEM-21237-0>
that appeared in *Global and Planetary Change*. We reported too on the
crowd-sourced rebuttal
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/10/the-harde-they-fall/>
led by Peter Köhler
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/04/harde-times/#ITEM-21237-1>
that was published last October. Now comes an editorial
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/04/harde-times/#ITEM-21237-2>
by three members of the Editorial Board (Martin Grosjean, Joel Guiot and
Zicheng Yu) reporting on what the circumstances were that led to the Harde
paper appearing.

The story is (unsurprisingly) one of ‘Pal Review’ (as noticed too by Eli
<http://rabett.blogspot.com/2018/04/pal-review.html>):

Our review revealed the following:

   1. During the initial manuscript submission, H. Harde suggested five
   potential reviewers. Most if not all of them are prominent individuals
   advocating that currently raising CO2 concentrations would be natural
   and not related to human influence. A careful assessment of their CVs,
   fields of expertise and publications lists leads to the conclusion that
   none of the five reviewers proposed by Harde can be considered as an expert
   or authority in carbon cycle, carbon or climate sensitivity or similar
   fields of research.
   2. All five suggested potential reviewers were invited by the Editor to
   provide formal reviews on the submitted manuscript. Two of them accepted
   the invitation and suggested ‘major revisions’ and ‘minor revisions’,
   respectively. Both reviewers asked the author for more clarity and better
   presentation, style and language; none of them raised any concern about the
   scientific content of the manuscript. We believe that this may have been
   because the reviewers lacked the impartiality and scientific expertise to
   provide an adequate science-based review.
   3. The referee’s comments were sent back to H. Harde. Revisions were
   made accordingly, the referees were satisfied with the revisions and the
   Editor accepted the revised manuscript for publication.
   4. In common with many other submissions to the journal at the time,
   none of the other Editors or Editorial Board members of Global and
   Planetary Change were involved in the peer review process by the Editor
   handling Harde (2017).

It seems to me that this gaming of the system should be grounds for
retraction, or at minimum an editorial note of concern, since the continued
availability of the paper leaves the impression that this paper was
appropriately peer reviewed and valid (neither of which is true).

The editorial continues with revelation that Harde was invited to submit a
reply to the rebuttal, but was trashed in review and rejected:

The journal editor offered Harde the opportunity for a formal Reply to
respond to Köhler et al.’s Comment article. However, after external expert
reviews, the Reply by Harde to the Comment by Köhler et al. (2018) was
rejected because it did not add any significant information to the argument
put forward in the original paper. In reviewing the Reply, the reviewers
felt that Harde’s argument is *“…too simplistic, based on invalid
assumptions, ignores a whole body of observational evidence, and cites
selectively literature that has long-time been disproved”*. The experts
confirm the suggestion by Köhler et al. (2018) that *“…the paper be
withdrawn by the author, editor or publisher due to fundamental errors in
the understanding of the carbon cycle.”* Most importantly, the expert
reviewers clarified that Harde (2017) does not contribute to a seemingly
open scientific debate or provides an alternative view. In contrast,
it *“…contains
many mistakes, misconceptions and omissions and ignores a vast body of
scholarly literature on the subject”*

As a result, authors submitting to GPC will no longer be able to suggest
reviewers, and all papers will include the name of the editor that dealt
with them.

However, the issue is not really that authors shouldn’t try to be helpful
in suggesting reviewers (this can be useful for editors and is widespread
among journals), but that editors should be be appropriately skeptical and
investigate whether the suggested reviewers are qualified and likely to be
impartial. If editors are targeted perhaps precisely because they are in a
different field, journals and publishers should make it easy to ask more
knowledgeable colleagues for advice.

We have said many times over the years that peer review, while necessary,
is not a sufficient condition
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-a-necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition/>
for a paper to be a positive contribution. Anomalies will get published –
and the techniques used by Harde are the usual route. Add in the technique
of submitting to journals that aren’t really in the field at all, or, more
recently, submitting to predatory journals that perform only perfunctory
review (if any).

Indeed, there is another example that just appeared by Rex Fleming
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/04/harde-times/#ITEM-21237-3>
in *“Environmental Earth Science”* which, despite the name is not a climate
science journal.

Time for some more crowd-sourcing?
References

   1. H. Harde, "Scrutinizing the carbon cycle and CO 2 residence time in
   the atmosphere", *Global and Planetary Change*, vol. 152, pp. 19-26,
   2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.02.009
   2. P. Köhler, J. Hauck, C. Völker, D.A. Wolf-Gladrow, M. Butzin, J.B.
   Halpern, K. Rice, and R.E. Zeebe, "Comment on “ Scrutinizing the carbon
   cycle and CO 2 residence time in the atmosphere ” by H. Harde", *Global
   and Planetary Change*, 2017.
   http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.09.015
   3. M. Grosjean, J. Guiot, and Z. Yu, "Commentary", *Global and Planetary
   Change*, vol. 164, pp. 65-66, 2018.
   http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.12.023
   4. R.J. Fleming, "An updated review about carbon dioxide and climate
   change", *Environmental Earth Sciences*, vol. 77, 2018.
   http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12665-018-7438-y
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