Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

At Times Higher: Peer review an “ineffective and unworthy” institution, some reforms proposed

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email
File:FileStack.jpg
What’s hot? What’s not?/Niklas Bildhauer, Wikimedia

From Les Hatton and Gregory Warr at Times Higher:

First, peer review is self-evidently useful in protecting established paradigms and disadvantaging challenges to entrenched scientific authority. Second, peer review, by controlling access to publication in the most prestigious journals helps to maintain the clearly recognised hierarchies of journals, of researchers, and of universities and research institutes. Peer reviewers should be experts in their field and will therefore have allegiances to leaders in their field and to their shared scientific consensus; conversely, there will be a natural hostility to challenges to the consensus, and peer reviewers have substantial power of influence (extending virtually to censorship) over publication in elite (and even not-so-elite) journals.

However, for any innovations in scientific publication to succeed two conditions would need to be met. The first, as noted above, is the provision with a publication of all the information necessary for independent reproduction and repeatability of the research, and the second is the improvement in the culture of science such that less than rigorous work and deceptive publication practices are no longer tolerated.

With the scientific method itself at risk, the stakes could not be higher. More.

The angst machine has been running on this topic for decades now. Hatton and Warr do recognize a critical aspect of the main problem: Peer review success enables a scientist to get established doing what other scientists do far more than it enables advancement of the field itself. And that is especially true when hard questions might need to be asked like, are we on the wrong track?

But howdoes on inculcate the idea of honesty in a culture tht no longer believe in free will or consciousness and think that maybe we evolved to need coercion.

See also: Retraction world: If this is science, yes we do hate it

Comments
One of the fundamental insights leading to the 'new' quantum mechanics was that of de Broglie's "matter-wave." When he submitted the article, the journal's editor didn't know what to make of it. So, he sent it to Einstein, who returned it saying that there was a profound insight contained in de Broglie's idea, and so the paper was published. It seems to me that is how it ought to be done. And the actual recommendations they make concerning arBxiv, and online commenting in my view move science in this direction.PaV
December 11, 2017
December
12
Dec
11
11
2017
04:43 PM
4
04
43
PM
PDT
The ancient Greeks understood the importance of having multiple competing schools of thought. The problem with peer review is not so much that the method of review is defective. The problem is that only one school of thought is allowed to exist, the materialist (naturalist) school. We need competing schools, not materialist fascism.FourFaces
December 11, 2017
December
12
Dec
11
11
2017
12:03 PM
12
12
03
PM
PDT
For decades: Yup. In my dad's first year as a professor at K-State he wrote an article describing the failures of 'publish or perish'. He practiced what he preached, never published another article. That was 1957.polistra
December 11, 2017
December
12
Dec
11
11
2017
11:47 AM
11
11
47
AM
PDT
Peer reviewers should be experts in their field and will therefore have allegiances to leaders in their field and to their shared scientific consensus; conversely, there will be a natural hostility to challenges to the consensus, and peer reviewers have substantial power of influence (extending virtually to censorship) over publication in elite (and even not-so-elite) journals.
We've been saying this for years here at UD. And it's been denied for years by Darwinists. Their strategem is this: first they say, "If you have such a good idea, then why isn't it being published in peer-reviewed journals. Obviously, it's a sub-standard way of thinking." Then, they make sure nothing is published in peer-review journals. When you point this out to them, they say,"Hah, what a bunch of baloney." Well, there's baloney involved all right. It's the idea that out-and-out censorship doesn't come into play. This is now being exposed. Wonderful. Maybe science can happen!PaV
December 11, 2017
December
12
Dec
11
11
2017
11:09 AM
11
11
09
AM
PDT

Leave a Reply