Not only that, rats that drank Roundup-club soda cocktails on the rocks added 30 points to their I.Q. and had glossier fur.
Were ANY statistical comparisons even made? Were basic statistical results even presented (such as SEMs, etc.)? In my 15 second scan, I don’t think I saw a single ‘p’ value although I may have missed it/them.
If it is actually the case that NO statistical analyses were done, the article doesn’t even merit review, let alone publication.
Academic librarians everywhere, and everyone who knows anything about academic publishing and is not in the pay of the big, commercial price-gouging publishers, most fervently wish ignorant, prejudiced turds like you would just go away!.
Your issues with M. Seralini, whatever the merits of that case (not that I see many on your side - you just seem to want to silence research whose conclusions don’t fit your prejudices) certainly do not justify this gratuitous and ignorant slur on what is almost undoubtedly the only way that academic publishing can be both democratized and saved from the profiteers. There are issues and problems surrounding open access publishing models, but their resolution sure as hell will not be solved this sort of ignorant mud-slinging.
I think it’s a worthwhile pit, regardless of the source. The general anti-GMO sentiment is to actively campaign against food that would alleviate mass starvation in the third world. These tards have figurative blood on their hands, and a **lot **of it. I’d say they have empty stomachs on their hands, but that argument doesn’t carry much weight. wink.
Forsooth! Thou hast slain mine keyboardeth.
This deserves acknowledgement. Manly head-nod and grimace toward you, good sir.
Oh, I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the sound of how shitty open-access journals are. And it makes sense, too - when there’s no financial interest in keeping readers, you can publish whatever the hell you want without worrying about people saying “fuck this journal, it’s terrible, I’m not gonna read it any more” - after all, your income is from the people publishing, not your readers, and while some scientists will probably opt for a journal with a higher reader base, you can always find desperate hacks like Eric-Giles Seralini or Niels H. Harrit willing to pay to be able to claim “look ma, my paper was peer-reviewed!”. Does that mean all open-access journals suck? No. Just most of them, and they should be treated as unreliable until proven otherwise.
Are you shitting me? The Seralini paper was panned by all but a handful of biased crazies. It’s so transparently flawed, with so little ambiguity as to the nature of the errors that I do not believe you spent even 5 seconds researching it. Dude, you’re defending the GMO equivalent of the Wakefield vaccine paper or the Regnerus gay parenting paper. I want it out of the literature not because it doesn’t fit my prejudices but because it’s a deliberately dishonest piece of shit, of which the sole aim is to further a political agenda.
Yes, there are tons of problems! How 'bout you fix the fact that 99% of open-access journals are crap before criticizing me for taking the obviously rational stance that we should treat them as though 99% of them were crap? Look, it’s really simple. PLOS ONE is a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. It’s open-access. It’s also currently the only open-access journal I’d trust. If I found others who published work of similar consistent quality, then I would trust them too. I’d welcome you to recommend them to me but what you said about Seralini’s paper throws that out the window. But in a market saturated with shit like Bentham Publishers, my first reaction to something published in an open-access journal is going to be “Yeah, sorry, don’t know that journal, it’s open-access, not interested”. It’s like if solar panels had a high chance of exploding violently. It’s a wonderful technology with a lot of promise but I’m not about to bet that the one I have isn’t a turd.
I know, right? You’d think that your average journal would realize that that’s kind of fucking important! In fact, the paper contained absolutely no statistical analysis whatsoever. Which makes sense - you couldn’t hit decent p-values from the data anyways! :rolleyes:
I think the title “Anti-GMO crackpot republishes shit paper” would be best. I still wouldn’t give a shit but at least I’d know what I wasn’t giving a shit about.
I find it easier to not give a shit about anything.
That is a wise policy.
I’m no expert, so I welcome any corrections, but I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.
There’s also a handy chart in the above wiki listing specific crops and giving the percentage of that crop that’s GM in the U.S. and the percentage that’s GM in the whole world. Takeaway: The U.S. has a much higher proportion of GM crops than does the rest of the world. Many developing countries are increasingly adopting GM crops, as well. The primary worldwide area of resistance to GM crops is in Europe. With such a high percentage of staple crops in the U.S. being GM, it’s no surprise that in Europe (with its regulations, labeling laws and much more prevalent popular opposition to GM), “GM foods are a comparatively small %” is probably a fair assessment.
It looks like that’s about to change, since EU nations have voted to allow member countries to decide for themselves whether to allow GM crops (till now the opposition of some nations has largely prevented their use). Once the European Parliament signs on, GM crops should be much more commonly grown in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.
It’s hard to make a case that the new wave of open-access journals is reducing “price-gouging”, since many of them seem to be in business chiefly to gouge fees out of authors.
At the same time, their standards are often ridiculously low (not that traditional journals don’t sometimes fall down on proper peer review, but the open-access model has made things worse).
Wait, what?
Maybe you aren’t aware of the Seralini case, and that’s OK. But you can look up the, um, ‘study’ yourself, or if you don’t want to do that the Wiki page gives a decent summary. The paper’s garbage, and I don’t know how it got published- there’s a broad scientific consensus that it’s garbage.
Thanks. That only serves to reinforce my conspiracy theory (which I only spontaneously considered upon originally reading this thread and its links) that there might be more to this than just bad science. With the regulatory environment opening up, there may be a concerted effort by some interested parties to maintain the status quo as much as possible, for as long as possible.
For sure there are commercial interests on both sides (and money to be made by proclaiming your products are “GMO-free”*), but I’d be wary of going down the conspiracy rabbit-hole. The anti-GMOers have made it pretty crowded down there. 
*there are products on the market now that proudly announce themselves to be non-GMO, including things like beer that don’t have any GMO counterparts. An outfit called the Non-GMO Project collects fees to certify products as “GMO-free”, including this hilarious example of Himalayan rock salt. Thank goodness there’s an alternative for those of us who are wary of having our chromosomes jangled up by using GMO Himalayan rock salt!
This tendency for non-GMO labeling brings up the question of why anti-GMOers are still insistent on labeling GMO content in foods, when there are now many non-GMO alternatives. Think it might be so they can force GM foods off the market through scare tactics? Naah…
But apparently it doesn’t matter enough to write a coherent OP. Unless you are only interested in preaching to the choir.
It seems I am. Withdrawn. What happened to the “embarrassed” smiley?
But don’t you understand? GMO = corporate profit, and corporate profit = Evil! And science must fight Evil by any means necessary!
As what in the USA would be considered a hopeless liberal, it makes me giddy to have typed the above line, but as someone whose education started in science I believe it is counterproductive to use ***junk ***science when fighting Corporate Evil.
** OTOH, HOWEVER:** By itself, merely coming up with results adverse to corporate profits does NOT create a presumption of junk science NOR does it create a presumption that the scientists are in some sort of *ideological *anti-corporate crusade. It just means you had better have your ducks in a row when doing the research and publishing the results.
Oh, and I’m sorry, but just like “natural” or “christian” or “American” or “e-” or “lite”, prefixing something with “open…” does not impart upon it any special aegis of virtue.
Yeah, I pretty much agree, which is why I deliberately labeled my suspicions as a conspiracy theory and noted how much research and thought I put into it. (very little)
See? Now you’re feeding my inner conspiracy theorist again!
But seriously, I wouldn’t *completely *write off my (largely baseless and unsupported) suspicions. When you look at what could possibly motivate such unabashed, blatantly bad science and then consider cui bono in an industry with so much money at stake, it really is a plausible scenario that someone commissioned some relatively cheap, phony research they can cite in their completely self-interested campaign against the “horrors” of everything GM. It’s not like most people actually check for reliable sources, anyway - they see a claim with a citation to some research supposedly backing it up, and they figure that it’s established fact. In this scenario, said research doesn’t have to convince actual scientists or other reasonably intelligent people, it only has to convince some politicians and a certain amount of the voting public, while providing a fig-leaf of an excuse to maintain the status quo in order to (not) “proceed with caution.”
You are very ignorant. It is true that there are some open access journals that are predatory and will publish anything for a fee (just as there are vanity book publishers), but there are also ones that do not charge authors any fee at all, but get their financing from other sources, and yet others that do ask publication fees, but also enforce peer review quite as rigorous as any traditional subscription-financed journals (and this is not just the PLoS journals, of which PLoS One is only one - and probably the least rigorously reviewed - out of a large stable). It is very much in their long term financial interest to do so, if they want to to survive and remain profitable. The predatory “vanity press” journals will not survive very long. Authors will soon realize (as they mostly have with “vanity” book publishers) that a publication there is worse than useless on their CV.
Please stop ignorantly slinging mud around you stupid little twat.
As I said, “whatever the merits of the case”. I know nothing about the Sealini paper and have no interest in defending it. It may well be rubbish (as many perfectly legitimately published scientific papers are.) However, the case Budget Player Cadet makes against it is terrible, and seems to be based on little besides his prejudice in favor of GMOs (which I suspect he does not really know very much about).