WIKIMEDIA, RAMALast month, in a series of Twitter posts, Yoav Gilad of the University of Chicago questioned the results of a Mouse ENCODE analysis published in PNAS last year. This week (May 19), Gilad and his coauthor Orna Mizrahi-Man published their reanalysis in an F1000 Research preprint, inviting open, post-publication peer review.
“We shared our analysis in the same way that the original data [were] shared—let the entire community figure it out,” Gilad told The Scientist.
But Michael Snyder of Stanford—one of the authors of the PNAS work who is not convinced that the reanalysis affects his team’s results—did not agree that Twitter was the right forum for such discussion. “Social media is a great forum for other discussions, but not when you’re critiquing someone’s work in this format,” he said.
Steve Phelps of the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in either study told The Scientist that the recent events reflect well on the state of peer review. “The reanalysis and the participation [from ENCODE researchers] is a pretty positive thing for science,” ...
