The company is taking definitive steps towards...

The company is taking definitive steps towards commercialisation, but the publishing steps have given me reasons to be cautious. I did a little bit more digging.

The annual report stated that they anticipate "the publication of its first original research paper in a highly respected, peer-reviewed, journal during Q1 FY25". They have done so, but they published their paper with MDPI, a publisher that has been observed to be less rigorous in their peer review process than many of the highly respected journals out there.This doesn't necessarily mean that the science that BCAL carried out is bad. Maybe there was pressure to get this research article out ASAP in light of the nearing commercial launch (lower stringency in the peer review process leads to quicker publication).

But here's the next thing that left me more disappointed: 13 of the 61 citations (21%) in their research paper also refer to articles published in journals with questionable reputations (11 articles cited from MDPI, 1 from Impact Journals, and 1 from Frontiers). Again, that's not to say that any of the cited science there is definitely bad. This is how I see it: the more papers that are cited from outside of the highly respected publishers, the higher the probability that some of the research in the cited work was done poorly.

In this case, I struggle to understand why they had to cite certain research articles when the other works they cited (from actually highly respected journals) would've been sufficient to support a widely accepted statement that they made. Another paper they cited contained typos and was written with generally poor sentence structure, which makes me question the editorial process of that journal/publisher.

I must note, however, that I don't think any of their conclusion hinges on any of the 13 citations. As a counter point to my poo-pooing of their referencing process, one of the 13 citations was discussing a negative result, another one was a study to find out the differences between two types of samples. These are likely cases of good science that aren't interesting enough to be picked up by the "highly respected journals" (the science publishing world is a bit of a shit show, but it's the best system we have so far).

They aim to publish four more research articles by the middle of next year. Would've been nice if I had to worry only about the execution of the commercialisation phase.