Honorable Community: This should be more than an exercise in rhetoric; we need > formulations that in simple terms expose the fundamentals of the process, > acknowledge its weaknesses, and distinguish it from phony imitators. > I sure don't have the answers, but I think that we as a community > could come up with them. > > Martin
Ah, Amen, brother Martin--if you will excuse the expression. I look forward to a list of candidate "answers" to Martin's most reasonable suggestion/challenge right here on Ecolog! With all this rapid-fire peer-review, it shouldn't take long, eh? WT PS: Please excuse me for deleting Hamazaki's message here; I don't know if I am the only one affected, but I get a window about installing a "language pack" that introduces an unnecessary step, since Hamazaki's text is in English, not Japanese, and I don't see the need to propagate even that relatively insignificant bug through out the list repeatedly. Perhaps Hamazaki could remove that feature from his future English postings? If that isn't possible, I suppose I can live with it, but I have to choose "cancel" every time it comes up--which is ever time I even touch a posting with Hamazaki's posts embedded in them with the cursor. But when there is a large number of such postings, it takes a lot of time; therefore, I tend to delete them. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Martin Meiss" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 2:29 PM Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] "real" versus "fake" peer-reviewed journals > Mr. Hamazaki's example, whether it is accurate or not, illustrates > one of my points. Just to get by in our professional lives, scientists must > have "faith" in the social institutions, such as peer review, that we have > created. And yet we all know that social institutions are inherently > corruptible. Not only peer-review, but many other aspects of the practice > of science, are rooted in these corruptible institutions. > Besides the issue I raised earlier, that of becoming too complacent > in our acceptance of our own perspective, there is the issue raised on the > earlier posts of this thread: How to demonstrate to students (and other > people who are not scientific professionals) that not all "peer review" is > created equal. Some journalists, in an attempt to be fair-minded and > objective, think they have to give equal time to holocaust deniers and to > survivors of concentration camps. This same tendency will give equal weight > to "our" and "their" peer-review processes. > Imagine that you are in a debate on a talk show with an ideologue who > cites dubious research results in a dubious journal, but claims that the > work is peer-reviewed. What do you say? "That isn't REAL peer-review", > "Is so!", "Is not!". > Suppose the show host is smart and stops this and asks how to > distinguish between valid and invalid peer review. What do you say? "We've > been doing it this way for many years."? "This is the scientific consensus > of how it should be done."? "This is the method used by people who think > right"? Try to come up with a wording that would make sense to a lay > audience and that couldn't be used by the opponent with equal plausibility, > at least to the ears of the lay people whose taxes are funding your > research. > This should be more than an exercise in rhetoric; we need > formulations that in simple terms expose the fundamentals of the process, > acknowledge its weaknesses, and distinguish it from phony imitators. > I sure don't have the answers, but I think that we as a community > could come up with them. > > Martin
