Other than your opinion, do you have any arguments to offer?
Otherwise I can just tell you my opinion as someone who works in academia: It makes perfect sense, and so far I haven't met anyone who was able to offer any better alternative to peer reviewing.
That being said, there are some reasons why there are more shady papers and journals today than there used to be.
The #1 reason is that many policy makers and science administrators got this unhealthy obsession with merely counting indicators, which leads young researchers to chase publication after publication regardless of the quality.
The #2 reason is that there are way more researchers competing for tenure, but jobs have barely increased and public spending on education and universities are overall low in comparison to other areas. You get what you pay for.
So there you go, another opinion, but at least a qualified one.
I enjoyed your comment. I agree with your reasons, though I don't think they are complete. I am not an expert on academia and I don't claim to be, so I have no solutions. I can just see the parallels and the general mechanisms.
I think the issue isn't with peer review. The issue is peer review coupled with barriers to entry. Some of it is monetary, which could conceivably be resolved through open access. Some of it is because it is socially walled off, this can be resolved through outreach and expansion into different media.
Consider how much more approachable a DEF CON talk is as compared to a research paper. What if we promulgated biological research in a similar fashion. Chubbyemu [1] explains diseases in a very approachable fashion. Perhaps we could do more do make research and academia approachable for the average person?
TL;DR: I think the issue is the need to demystify academia, peer review is only a part of that.
Geologist here. Interactive public review plus transparent peer review has become standard on the journals of the European Geophysical Union [1]. These are also open-access.
Yeah that's just what I need. Aside from being reviewed by people with a passing familiarity with what I am doing, I would like every certified internet genius who has never heard of my field to comment on my unpublished work.
The point isn't that, I think. It's that valuable reviews are easily downed out by YouTube-comment-quality reviews. Schemes like curation of reviews by up-/downvoting don't work for most papers, as they are of interest to only a relatively small number of people engaged in that particular niche of scientific inquiry (which, by the way, is kind of the nature of things as a field specializes more and more). The concern is that there wouldn't be enough "genuine" people to counteract the noise.
I'd wager that the whole concept has staled. In 1800, when you could have the smartest polymaths in the world look at your paper, that stamp of approval meant something.
I never looked at the peer review process in that way ("stamp of approval"). For a journal article, as long as it's not a desk-rejection (because the study is not in scope of the journal or such), it's usually an iterative process involving the authors, the reviewers, and the editor, which results in an often greatly improved article. A key person in that process is often the editor, rather than the reviewers (if they do their job well).
Peer review as such does not provide much of a signal as to how important a paper is or a binary "good paper"/"bad paper" decision; ideally, it's a process that helps maintain a certain standard. Conference proceedings typically don't use this process, but (more or less) ask for a simple yes/no (or a 1-5 rating where everyone knows that it's going to be rejected if you don't give a high enough rating because of a 30% acceptance rate etc.).
You are aware that half of these certified internet geniuses are trolls and crackpots who try to prove why Special Relativity Theory is wrong or promote their own free energy devices, though, right? RIGHT?
it is not whether it can hold up against an onslaught of cranks, trolls, and well meaning idiots, but whether a researcher should be expected to have to defend their hard work against them in order to get published. Bullshit can always be cranked put faster than you could ever address. Or do you think that everytime an astronomer tries to publish a paper she should have to address the very serious concerns of flat-earthrs and young-earth creationists???
I guess so. I was imagining what a massive waste of time and energy it will be to just read the comments much less respond to them. It's already bad enough when you have people in your field who refuse to understand your work no matter how you re-word your explanation (yeah, going through this right now), but when you have people like the Wikipedia editors or reddit commenters who have all the time and energy in the world and no understanding of your field, you can imagine how much of a disaster it will be.
Reminds me of a time when this person in my field decided to move its most popular wiki to Wikipedia and delete the wiki site. Well it resulted in the wiki site being gone, and a bunch of scattered Wikipedia pages with no content because it was way too much trouble to get the Wikipedia editors to change the content so that it will be actually informative.
> Well, maybe because it's all done by a priest-caste cartel, shielded from reality in ivory towers, and then presented to the public in a similar way religion once was forced on peasants (taxes included). Academia is the modern priesthood: usurping the right to all knowledge, in bed with the state, corrupted to the bones, fighting heretics.
I don't mean to be rude....I actually fuck that. I mean to be rude. You are an irrefutable argument against public-review.
> The fact nobody has ever suggested public-review on-top of peer review makes me think academia really doesn't think about this issue much at all.
There are not only such suggestions, there is even a whole research discipline solely dedicated to evaluating peer reviewing, and there is a metric ton of papers about the topic written by disciples from many different areas.
"Academia is the modern priesthood: usurping the right to all knowledge, in bed with state, corrupted to the bones."
That goes way too far. There are plenty of areas where great work is being done. But yes, there are some where bad work is done. And a lot of the people that talk about science in public have an agenda and they get heard over the people who do real science.
> There are plenty of areas where great work is being done.
You could say the same stuff about the historical priesthood. For ages, knowledge, and science were cultivated by priests. They were the ones that could read, write, they hand-copied books, they advised rules, helped peasants, took care of sick, poor and so an so.
Which doesn't invalidate my critique about the corruption. The mechanisms are exactly the same.
You just have to be careful not to reject all scientists. When I listen to my neighbor he rejects all climate science (because they all have an agenda) but trusts the deniers who are a very loud, very small minority. This make no sense.
Human psychology. Negative statements are given greater weight. You neighbor is happily living in the matrix and sees no need to observe reality with objective reason when the negative pundits give him regular doses of satisfying outrage to feel good about.
This is mostly just hot air and empty claims. Do you interact much with professors at leading universities? I do. In my experience it is a very talented, competitive, and hard-working group of people. Not at all like some distant, unaccountable caste.
I think you're missing the point. Sure, the professors I've met have been great people who are some of the most introspective and dedicated people I've met. But most people haven't met many, if any, research professors. To most of the public, academia is a largely closed off institution. The fact that they're often geographically separated, and socially separated through admissions requirements further exacerbates this problem. Not to mention rather politically homogeneous. To much of the country, professors are an insular, caste-like group of elites. People who have had the education opportunities that we have know differently, but chances are we aren't representative of the rest of the population.
> I only chose to respond because I found the “priestly caste” analogy to be utterly without foundation, but yet presented as if it was full of insight.
My point is that there is foundation in the public mind (which is almost certainly what the above poster was referring to).,
We are off-topic, in the way my original reply tried to bring out.
But let's pursue this line of thinking. Your claim is that significant elements of the public scorn professors because they are perceived as, and act as, an elitist caste. I call BS on this as well. A large segment of academia is very devoted to public outreach, including by pop science TV/youtube, press releases, free in-person and video lectures, public outreach, blogging, and posting papers on arxiv. This is the best of academic culture.
A sensible person can take advantage of this wealth of free knowledge. A bigoted person can invent some kind of culture war and play out stick figures in their head.
I come from people who had greatly varying degrees of education. Many didn't go to college, some failed out. A couple are (or were, RIP) sometimes bigoted towards people who have specialized expertise and training, but aside from those very few, the vast majority have respect for specialized knowledge in general, and academia in particular.
I think it does a great disservice to the common sense of that vast majority of non-academics, to suppose they are bigoted towards academia because of some kind of culture war stereotype.
