djpbaltimore said:
Dear Wiggo said:
Pedantically, no.
It will most likely be behind a paywall, requiring $20-50 to view it, and it will not contain the raw data per se, but tables of summarised data or graphs with no indication of actual data point values.
The fact that Coyle could publish what he published about Armstrong proves the peer review process is complete bullsht and to continue to use this publishing process as an excuse for the lateness is smoke and mirrors.
I am, believe it or not, very interested to see what they release and more than happy to keep an open mind.
But DB did promise a Q&A session at Manchester in 2012, and we saw how well that went, didn't we?
Total hyperbolic nonsense. No one is claiming that peer review is a perfect system, but your analysis is just as wrong. Peer review is the most valuable tool in Science. As for the timing, I have never heard of a paper being published in such a short time period as you are expecting this work to be published. Reviewers often get upwards of 4 weeks to make their comments and writing/ revision can take just as long or longer depending on the number of authors and organizations involved. And with some journals, the paper may be accepted and sit 'in press' for months before the actual edition is published. Unless you have experienced the process firsthand, there are many things that you will fail to take into account that plays into the delay. Overall, you can't put a timetable on publishing in peer review journals.
Hopefully it will be in an open access journal, but the pay wall is exactly why mainstream reporting of the data is important. And skeptics will be able to access the paper as easily as believers.
Firstly, I have person experience of the peer review system, being a published scientist (though not sport's scientist), and agree with the above statements for a full blown article.
But is that what we are actually talking about? I am not au fait with the scope of the tests Froome has undertaken (and the Scope of Work would be interesting to know, frankly, because also feeds into the legitimacy of the data). Nor do I know the degree of detailed analysis being commissioned. But a set of personal data wouldn't be published in a journal without being put into a wider context anyway, because individual results don't constitute very much of interest to the wider science even if Froome were a freak of nature. Might make a 'research letters' section or something, which has a lot less lead time.
But that isn't what I understood this to be all about…I understood this to be some kind of testing of Froome to demonstrate his physiological performance capabilities and refute criticism received in the Tour.
Assuming what we are looking at is an analysis of Froome's data, then, for the scientists involved, this is basically a consultancy project…they will be commissioned to review and comment upon data collected. I really don't see how analysing one guys dataset on the basis of expert judgement and established benchmarks and making bland statements about what it indicates…honestly, I'm guessing, but I'd reckon it'd take less than a week. Perhaps significantly less. Let's be generous and say two weeks though, including their superior signing off on it, to make sure their are no hostages to fortune. (As a medical comparison, I was part of a 'population well-being' assessment recently, involving a week of monitoring, a full day of tests, MRI scans, thyroid/liver you name it functioning test, lots and lots of bloodwork, heart, VO max etc….and I got my results and basic analysis back via my doctor as part of the deal of my contributing my time within four weeks…there were 10,000 people in that research project so a shed-load of other data to handle and QA/QC along with mine)
If Sky were really committed to transparency, what they would release would be the analyses undertaken (i.e. the reports of the scientists) with the raw data appended to it. It doesn't need to be peer-reviewed before doing this. If they didn't want to release it to the general public for fear of all manner of imbeciles without knowledge getting involved, they could make it available to any legitimate sports science institution for a free 'peer review' or to inform their research.
As things stand, all I believe we'll be getting is a (rather tame) journalist's interpretation of two (or is it three?) reports - I'm not clear whether these are separate and independent (i.e. a triangulation of three different reports from three totally independent people), or three different parts of the tests being studied by three different specialists…whatever comes out in a peer reviewed journal I strongly suspect will be a much wider paper about physiology and not 'Mr Froome's detailed test results for your delectation'.
I must say I would be interested to know whether or not the people commissioned had all specific identifiers from the dataset removed to make sure there was no bias…that's what would have happened in my field for this kind of short consultancy project…and we weren't even studying people. As I said, the scope of work would be interesting too…if they aren't being commissioned to comment on something, they won't comment on it, but we won't necessarily know that they haven't been asked to look at it, and omission from scope can very easily be assumed to mean 'omission because of nothing interesting to say' unless someone asks the right questions about why there are gaps, or a lack of emphasis on one topic or another...