Ian, Peer review at minimum is designed to ensure that the editor's deciding whether or not to publish an article have the faintest clue what the article is talking about. While certainly politics are involved they are secondary considerations and they are academic politics not government politics.
I confess to not having the time or interest to read the Booth article in full but your exchange with Bradford was interesting. Newton just about single handedly invented modern science. His reluctance to publish and his battles with Hook and Royal Society are legendary. But this is the kind of office politics that is inevitable in any human institution. Peer review is an academic practice aimed at maintaining the quality of academic research. The fact that it on occasion fails is not a condemnation of the practice. Academics are quick to root out and censure mistakes when they are found. All you are doing with this kind of postmodernish-cult-of-professionals talk is fuelling the kind of misguided and political condemnation of academia that the Platt's of the world relish. The idea that academia should support the publication of any crazy idea someone wants to publish is just wrong. There are plenty of outlets to publish anything anyone wants to say. The internet, at least for the time being, is the great equalizer of information access. But to receive a "Quality" seal of approval from an academic journal, authors must rightly go through a process to at least try to make sure their ideas have merit. To abandon this goal to some idealized democratization of intellect is sheer folly. Society can eventually learn to love its contrarians but by God they ought to have to work for that love. There should be obstacles in the path of wackos. If society is going to be totally open minded there is not telling what kind of nonsense will pass as common sense. Case moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
