Bioethics Lunch – Publishing & Peer-Review

BIONIC and Dr. Barry Belmont invite you to join them for lunch and a discussion on the ethics of publishing in science and the peer-review system with special guest Dr. Nick Kotov.

Peer-review is colloquially deemed to be sub-optimal, if not broken, but we continue to rely upon it for publishing our results. Furthermore, we routinely evaluate scientists (e.g. their caliber as scientists, considerations for promotion, etc.) based on the quantity of their publications – not the quality. How can we design an ethically-optimal system for disseminating scientific results? If not by number of publications produced by a flawed system, how are we to evaluate the quality of researchers? If we agree that peer-review is not effective, are we obligated to find other routes to communicate our results when our work has such huge impacts on the life of the public? In what manner should those that commit fraud and plagiarism be punished? How do we reliably determine an honest mistake and malicious behavior?

Dr. Kotov is the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, with appointments in Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Macromolecular Science and Engineering. He has authored and co-authored hundreds of scientific manuscripts, and has written on fraud and the evaluation of scientists based on their rate of publication as an editor for the journal ACS Nano.