ie. you break the scientific literature (by publishing something so bad it should be retracted), you are responsible for fixing it (by investigating it, retracting it, and publicizing that).
Whereas the way journals actually work is ‘heads I win tails everyone else loses’: they get all the prestige and fame (and extremely lucrative financial payments) from publishing influential research, while taking no responsibility whatsoever for publishing bad research (regardless of the harms, eg. Wakefield), not lifting a finger to investigate any claims or criticisms, and generally adopting an attitude that anything which has been “published after peer review” has therefore been handed down from Mount Sinai and critics should have to work like dogs to justify even getting a few paragraphs into the journal buried where no one can read it and never mentioned anywhere else.
ie. you break the scientific literature (by publishing something so bad it should be retracted), you are responsible for fixing it (by investigating it, retracting it, and publicizing that).
Whereas the way journals actually work is ‘heads I win tails everyone else loses’: they get all the prestige and fame (and extremely lucrative financial payments) from publishing influential research, while taking no responsibility whatsoever for publishing bad research (regardless of the harms, eg. Wakefield), not lifting a finger to investigate any claims or criticisms, and generally adopting an attitude that anything which has been “published after peer review” has therefore been handed down from Mount Sinai and critics should have to work like dogs to justify even getting a few paragraphs into the journal buried where no one can read it and never mentioned anywhere else.
Ah, gotcha. Thank you.