An Innovative Solution to the Failures of Peer Review

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | August 13, 2021 | Adam Ellwanger

[karpov]

Academics are growing wary of the peer review process amid mounting evidence that it is compromised by ideological biases and that it does not effectively or reliably ensure the quality of published research. Further, it is increasingly evident that the academic publishing industry’s primary reason for being is not to disseminate new knowledge to the public, but rather to serve as a bureaucratic metric for professional advancement. While the failure of the traditional peer review process might seem to justify pessimism on the part of scholars, the good news is that some academics are reimagining how academic publishing can work.

Recently, I had a chance to talk to two professors who have developed an alternative to the corrupted process of peer review. Dr. Harry Crane (Professor of Statistics at Rutgers) and Dr. Ryan Martin (Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University) are the founders of Researchers.One, an online platform that allows scholars to publish new research and facilitates a critical dialogue to refine new scholarship. Our conversation addressed some of the shortcomings of the peer review process as it currently exists, and we discussed how the Researchers.One platform not only restores the most important functions of academic publishing, but also how it returns the ownership of intellectual property to the scholars themselves.

Video of our conversation can be viewed here, and an edited and abbreviated transcript is available below.

Researchers.One invites scholars of all disciplines to use its platform to publish their scholarship without the middleman.

[The people have spoken]

This new platform allows publication of research papers without peer review, hoping to get feedback.

There is already a similar platform in the fields of physics, math, and computer science called arXiv. But an arXiv preprint is not regarded as a published paper because it has not necessarily been verified by anyone except the author. Errors are common.

It will take a long time for these alternative platforms to have the same level of respect as peer-reviewed journals.

[aquila48]

Bookmark

[Chode]

couple years ago a some papers were written to spoof the Peer review process and punked them bigly

[Chode]

Scholarly articles for fake Peer Reviewed papers
The science of fake news - ‎Lazer - Cited by 1985
Fake news: A definition - ‎Gelfert - Cited by 343
A rational design process: How and why to fake it - ‎Parnas - Cited by 1143

What the New Sokal Hoax Reveals About Academia - The ...
https://www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2018/10
Oct 5, 2018 — Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon ...

Hoaxers Slip Breastaurants and Dog-Park Sex Into Journals ...
https://www.nytimes.com › arts › academic-journals-hoax
Oct 4, 2018 — Another, from a journal of feminist geography, parsed “human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity” at dog parks in Portland, Ore., ...

[spankalib]

I remember that - it was delightful.

This writer puffs his prose a bit. A trait, no doubt, valued in peer reviewers *snicker*...He states

Academics are growing wary of the peer review process amid mounting evidence that it is compromised by ideological biases ya think?

and that it does not effectively or reliably ensure the quality of published research.

14 words to say they're incompetent, all the while, the whole ignores their LEFTIST INCOMPETENCE.

[Chode]

100%

[consult]

Chilling to think that this is what science has become. Forcing one to stick with the consensus or not be published.
“”
The peer-review process today has been co-opted by gatekeeping bureaucrats to serve administrative ends.
Academia operates like the mafia, as anyone on the inside knows. ..... This creates a disincentive, especially for junior folks, to try to branch out and develop genuinely new ideas. The strategy to be successful in a world like that is to keep your head down and stay in line. “”