Progress

In a post two years ago I discussed how difficult it was to find good tools for editing scientific texts by multiple authors simultaneously.  As there is a great demand for this functionality it does not come to a surprise that the situation has improved considerably. I will describe two solutions here that in our group we now use on a daily base.

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Communicating in a language that is not your mother tongue is a handicap. For Germans and Dutch people speaking and writing acceptable English can be achieved after a few years of school. For people from Japan or from China this is a nightmare. But scientists from these countries have to do it if they want to have their papers published in leading journals.

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Peer review is central to science. But the system is functioning far from perfectly. One issue is that it is difficult to find good reviewers. This was already discussed five years ago on this blog and it was suggested that paying reviewers or making somehow sure that reviewers receive public credit for their efforts might be good ways to alleviate the problem. I agree especially with getting paid, but in my life I’ve only once been offered money to review a research paper. The offer, from a Saudi Arabian journal I had never heard about, surprised me so much that I decided to give it a try. They sent me a terrible paper to review and when I had filed my report, they paid me promptly.

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