A rare opportunity, a look behind the curtains of "scientific peer review" corrupting science; moreover, revealing sniffs of
the swamp that is the established community publishing on memristors - another case of hype in science, but the implications are general and can be only
more severe with issues where more money than Hewlett Packard’s is involved, or powerful political interests such as with global warming.
Two reviewer’s
reject a draft (NOT my draft and I do NOT know the authors). They reject for different, mutually inconsistent reasons,
out of pure self-interest. The science is not settled on any controversial
issue, simply because the creation of scientific “consensus” is a corrupt game
of bullies and interests alien to what apologists such as "new
atheists" religiously believe, namely scientific method being
central and a somehow nice (free, democratic, …) discourse among
selfless and wise people.
The poor authors are left with two options:
1) Revise
according to good science, retry in low impact factor journals with few
reviewers, hoping for luck, maybe one reviewer
agrees and the other does not care. This round took them half a year
or more (probably because the established guy waited as long as possible to
reply – the usual tactic), and it got them nowhere.
2) Remove all criticism (!)
and add more citations to the work of established bullies so that they hopefully let the work pass in another journal simply because it benefits their
own citation record. The author’s jobs depend on publishing, being cited, and impact factors, so you know what they must do.
Look at the following three reviews and decide whose scientific writings
you trust: The crackpot's, the established bully's, or those by the rare reviewer who takes the peer
review process as a vital part of science seriously, providing a helpful
review.
One reviewer is a crackpot, because he/she
only accepts “nonlinear resistors with memory” although the memristor was
defined (!) as a separate scientific concept in 1971 (it is not just a resistor with memory, by definition!):
“This survey is full of inaccuracies and
errors that before it could be published it needs a major restructuring. First
of all, memristors, namely nonlinear resistors with memory is not a concept
first proposed and discussed by Chua in 1971. This shows only ignorance of some
fundamental physics theories that were well known since the 50s’. For a recent
paper showing that resistors with memory have been known and described on
rigorous mathematical grounds well before 1971 please see the paper
Nanotechnology 24, 255201 (2013) that uses the well-known Kubo theory (from the
50s’) to show that memristors are resistors with memory and were well known.
Second, we should stop writing false
statements like “In 2008, HP lab proved its existence”. This is blatantly
false! Thin films of TiO2 sandwiched between metals were very well known since
the 60s’. HP did not prove anything. They simply showed that their system could
be described using resistors with memory.For a comprehensive review of this
history the authors should read Advances in Physics 60, 145-227 (2011). All
these statements need to be revised accordingly in the abstract/intro and other
parts of the review with the proper references before I can recommend it
publication”
Note how this reviewer mainly wants a
certain ‘Advances in Physics’ paper cited and indicates to likely recommend
publication if only his desired references are cited and the worst of what he does not
like is changed, which is very little given the lengthy draft; there even is a section on brain science.
Let's translate for those who are not
used to interpreting peer review reports in order to strategically revise
drafts so to get published and survive in this silly game: Cite me, change what
I do not like, and I will no longer care about the rest, otherwise I will report “full of inaccuracies and errors” to ensure rejection.
The next rejection is from the established camp. Bullying is all they need. The author’s English is not worse than what one can see published (published (!), not just under
review with revision still to come) by for example Japanese authors even in
journals such as PRL. The message is: Go away; everything worth saying is published by me and
my friends; our rejection does not need to mention more but the convenient routine
bashing of uncomfortable international authors by claiming their English is too
bad, plus a few side issues found glancing at the figures, not even stating
what we want to see presented as “imortant [sic] mile stones”; we are
established, so it is obvious how to get in line:
“Unfortunately, the paper is not well
written with so many language problems that it makes no sense to list them all
in these comments. Please ask a native speaker. There are many problems,
e.g. (page 2) the memristor is not a crossbar structure, imortant mile stones
are not given in Fig.1, the quality of Fig. 2 is poor with no description
of the content, the feature of a memristor is the pinched hysteresis loop (see
page 3: all resistive switching memories meet Lissajous..),...etc.
Memristor overviews are already given in
the books:
1) Memristors and Memristive Systems,
(edited by R. Tetzlaff) , Springer 2014,
2) Memristor Networks (edited by A.
Adamatzky and L.Chua) , Springer 2014
Furthermore there special issues, e.g. IEEE
CAS Magazine, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2013.”
We may not all be able to appreciate the
details; good information on memristoras is hard to find (The mentioned IEEE special issue rejected all critical contributions, the Springer books are mere hype). But I think we can all pick up on that the two reports totally oppose each other: The
first tells of huge problems, none with the language, instead all
around the memristor, and it almost mentions that Hewlett Packard pulled an
advertising stunt. The second review pretends that there is no controversy at all;
everything is fine and has been published by those in bed with HP money and
comfortably positioned in the hierarchies so that they can publish one book after another on top of a huge pile of hyped "scientific" articles. No
mentioning of that the authors dared to cite a critical paper, which is
probably the only reason for the second rejection, since otherwise, the author's draft
is conformist.
These
reviewers are typical for scientific peer review as I witness it for almost 20
years. The next most typical would be a guy in the middle of the
hierarchies finding his own paper being quoted among nonsense and replying: OK
– publish.
The third reviewer was me, a rare type. I try helping the authors
to improve on a scientific basis, taking the whole draft seriously, not only
what may get into the way of my own interests, but respecting what the authors want
to accomplish, which needs a sympathetic, charitable reading:
1) The paper claims to give a historical
overview, but fails to mention the researchers who found the structurally
equivalent memristive devices before 2008 [H. M. Upadhyaya and Suresh Chandra,
Semicond. Sci. Technol. 10, 332, (1995). Suresh Chandra, IETE Technical Review
27, 179 (2010)].
2) The authors claim (Page 2, Line 14) that
all previous researchers, who found memristive devices before 2008, did not
make the connection to the memristor (as if they failed to notice a
connection). However, they were well aware of the memristor concept and thus
knew that such devices are not memristors.
3) The paper presents only a single
critical author (and only on the very last page) whose “criticism” is well
known to be unsubstantiated and only published on the pseudoscience webpage
vixra (not even on the arxiv anymore). Presenting it like this makes it appear as if all criticism is pseudoscience.
Serious criticism has been published in the peer-reviewed literature [S.
Vongehr, Adv. Sci. Lett. 17, 285-290 (2012)]. [UPDATE: A better citation would now be:(2015),
"The
Missing Memristor has Not been Found", Scientific Reports 5:
11657, Bibcode:2015NatSR...511657V,
doi:10.1038/srep11657]
4) Equation 2 is already wrongly described,
because w=1 does not result in R_on. It should be w=D instead. I suggest that
the authors check all equations and their explanations carefully.
5) Section 2 claims that there are very
different models, but all, even the filament growth, are a traveling boundary
(which memorizes the charge). In this sense, they are all emulators, namely,
they are mechanisms that remember the charge. The authors should explain what
the difference between ‘a mere emulator’ and ‘the real thing’ is. If there is
no fundamental difference, either the “emulators” [for example the solid state
ones of reference 56] are equally memristors, or the found “memristor” is also
only an emulator of the true memristor. That something is nano-sized does not
make it more real (rather than being a nano-size emulator).
6) Section 4.2 should perhaps be removed or
needs to explain more carefully what the memristive devices’ role is. The
revolution in brain science is that the plasticity of the dendrite/axon/synapse
structure increases the number of primitive units 100 fold (count synapses and
fast electrical gap-junctions, not neurons). Thus, sub-ms precision
spike-timing has replaced the old model, which centered on the average firing
rate of I&F neurons; an early model that averaged out all the information
in the firing pattern that high level neurons (retina or cortex) use to “talk
to each other”.All of this is relatively novel but precedes the current
memristor hype by at least 10 years and has nothing to do with memristive
devices! Memristive devices may be one of many ways toward the plasticity of an
artificial synapse. That they are the most efficient way is far from obvious.
Writing as if the use of memristive devices can suddenly hand us a brain where
neural-networks with differently provided plasticity failed, is naïve and must
be regarded as hype.
7) The English could be much improved, but
such is secondary to the science. Nevertheless, at least the title should not
be [removed].
In summary: I am happy to review more
positively on such a review around this interesting topic, however, only after
a major revision by the authors. As of now, it is too biased, too much copying
of undigested hype in order to justify publication.
Science blogs claim to be a new mechanism of
oversight. They point to the very few instances, such as the scandal around arsenic
life forms, where science blogs helped to criticize. However, science blogs
mainly regurgitate press releases and glorify a systemically
corrupt system that inflates by constructing false knowledge. Bloggers suck up to the established
in-crowds in the hope for a few morsels falling from the table, internet links from
those who made it, a book deal to feed their narcissism.
The science is settled, yes, but how, who settles it how?
-----------------------
UPDATE IN REPLY TO COMMENTS:
Please do not forget that the issue is not just terminology (the "Wired" article makes it out to be about some people being obsessed with words). The actually predicted memristor may exist! Would you agree to go with something fake instead of the real Higgs boson, stopping the research for the actually predicted entity?
