Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy Group

by Ian McLaughlin   On the 24 th of October, the Penn Science Policy Group met to discuss the implications of a new mechanism by which individuals can essentially take part in the peer review process.   The group discussion focused on a particular platform, PubPeer.com, which emerged in 2012 and has since become a topic of interest and controversy among the scientific community.   In essence, PubPeer is an online forum that focuses on enabling post-publication commentary, which ranges from small concerns by motivated article readers, to deeper dives into the legitimacy of figures, data, and statistics in the publication.   Given the current state of the widely criticized peer-review process, we considered the advantages and disadvantages of democratizing the process with the added layer of anonymity applied to reviewers. PubPeer has been involved in fostering investigations of several scandals in science.   Some examples include a critical evaluation of...

** Link for live streaming of this event can be found here ** by Hannah Shoenhard, Jamie DeNizio, and Michael Allegrezza Craig Spencer, a New York City doctor, tested positive for Ebola on October 23. The story broke online the same day, and by the next morning, tabloids were plastered with images of masked and gowned health workers with headlines such as  Bungle Fever and Ebola! Late-night comedy, Twitter, local news: the story was inescapable, the hysteria palpable. All in all, only eleven Ebola patients were treated on U.S. soil. But the media’s reaction affected the lives of anyone who watched television or had an internet connection. The Ebola epidemic in Africa has died down. Liberia is Ebola-free, while Sierra Leone and Guinea continue to report cases in the low single digits per week. Most promisingly, a new vaccine has been shown to be highly effective in a clinical trial. Given the vaccine, it seems that the likelihood of future epidemics on the scale of the o...