Examining Peer Review

By News on the Net —— Bio and Archives April 22, 2010

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Kim Greenhouse, It's Rainmaking Time! Peer review was established to ensure quality and accuracy of academic research and publications. As one university library tells students, “Peer review ensures that an article—and therefore the journal and the scholarship of the discipline as a whole—maintains a high standard of quality, accuracy, and academic integrity. When you consult peer-reviewed sources, you are tapping into a wealth of established, verified knowledge.” Does this mean non-peer reviewed materials have no value? What happens if academics refuse to peer review? Are they the only arbiters of quality and accuracy?

Few people outside of academia know what it is or how it operates. Like most ideas and methods, Peer Review has evolved from its original purpose in ways that many academics never anticipated. Some of these were part of the scandals involving climate science and the perversion of scientific and academic method. While Peer-review has mostly been thought of as the way Ideas get their credibility, in fact, Peer Review has become an incestuous system that often invites corruption and territoriality so that most of the realm of new discoveries can’t make their way to the world. The Peer Review Process is often antithetical to innovation and perpetuates prevailing knowledge. We need a new and better process and paradigm because of the hugely important implications for the betterment of all of society. More plus interview