Open Peer Review to Save the World by Philip Gibbs

Dear founder of viXra,

Open peer review would certainly be valuable. However, would it save the world?

Eckard

Hi Philip,

Your essay is pure gold and I really do hope that you'll win this contest. I agree with Eckard ("However, would it save the world?") but never the less, you are showing the right path!

I'll give you 2 in binary format ;-)

Sorry about that! I just wanted to show a proper scale for your piece. I didn't imply that you should do the same. I know, based on last year's contest, that here is some collusion ongoing but that doesn't do any good for those involved in it.

Pushing poor essays into the final only makes it easier for those actually good pieces to gain top positions!

Being not even a public reviewer of the claim that something will save the world, I feel somewhat amused by titles like Bee's that remind me of a self-ironic song in German "Nur mal kurz die Welt retten" (My translation: I will just save the world in a few minutes).

I think I understand and largely support your approach. "Decisions based on academic research rather than the biases of public opinion" sounds prudent.

Nonetheless Alfred Nobel guided me to slightly different conclusions. Is steering really always a question of decision making or did the invention of dynamite per se steer the history?

Experienced WWII caused me to ask for what went wrong. May we blame single decisions or were patriotism, tin soldiers, revenge propaganda, etc. already before WWI among the true reasons?

What about nuclear fusion, I wonder how many participants of the contest supported the hope for cold fusion on the basis of most likely just fabricated experimental results. I heard trustworthy comments that spoke of pathologic science. I will not invest a single Cent into something where the promise is huge for decades while there is obviously no realistic chance of true success. Instead of supporting illusions or risky for nature technologies I would prefer looking for feasible mechanisms of birth control worldwide. This will face fierce resistance by those many who are hoping to benefiting from economic growth, personal, religious, or national power, or who rely on funding.

If groups of cherished theories or idolized experts went wrong and must be abandoned then this will also require more than a public peer-review.

I appreciate FQXi as a forum that allows to put and pursue really foundational questions.

Elsewhere we have some public self-declared peers.

Sincerly,

Eckard Blumschein

The great thing about this essay is that it is focused and we can all agree that it is addressing an important practical problem and its potential solution which can contribute to humanity's steering. That said, it does not address the question posed directly.

Supposing you could somehow fix the peer-review process in academia, would that solve the problem of steering the future? Is there a lack of scientific consensus which is the main reason for big problems facing humanity? Or are we imagining that "open peer review" will somehow translate to social and political consensus - and action?

Also, I think the most telling lines of the essay are these:

"How do you let anyone have their say while still maintaining an orderly process and arriving at an unbiased conclusion?

The answer to that is not yet clear..."

If I were intending to be completely snarky I would leave it at that, but the essay continues:

...but there is hope that letting anyone have their say is not necessarily a recipe for disaster. Wikipedia is a good example of a system that allows anyone to contribute."

I address this also in my essay; the experience of Wikipedia has shown that, in fact, in order to maintain order it is necessary to have a hidden if not invisible clique of editors who exercise power over ordinary participants. Also, Wikipedia is not making decisions for steering humanity. Users go to it because they find it useful. On controversial issues, it aims for a balanced and reasonably comprehensive presentation of views, so partisans have no real incentive to opt out, which would only mean no representation at all.

Also, Wikipedia is not a completely convergent process. If you don't like what's on one page about your topic, you can invent a new one that frames it differently; then maybe you will have to fight off an attempt to merge, but you might win something in that battle.

But you are right that another key to making Wiki work is the establishment of rules and conventions. The seemingly rigid and (relative to other web content) impoverished presentation is actually very important. These are features that can work in open peer-review within academic communities with a shared interest in the advancement of knowledge, but it is less clear that it solves the problem of steering humanity where interests and strongly held viewpoints conflict and battles are fought often violently.

Bravo Philip your excellent ideas have been solidly backed by your excellent deeds. When arXiv accepted two of my papers because an academic friend had sponsored them, but then rejected my next paper because I submitted it myself, I felt demeaned and cheated . So when I discovered your viXra archive it was a godsend - no anonymous people judging my ideas because I worked independently. So again thank you for that and keep viXra alive!

Open peer review need not be restricted to scientific research. As you suggest it can be made part of the system of governance at many level. The other day I had found that a nice wide green walkway had been decreed off- limits to cyclists. This in a city where mothers often use bicycles to carry children to their many after school cram schools. Or nurseries. Had they asked the populace to decide who uses the walkway things might have been different.

Incidentally this fqxi system of peer rating is not open - we do not know who rated a particular essay and more importantly why....

With best wishes

Vladimir

Dear Dr. Gibbs,

I enjoyed your essay and agreed with many of the points: peer review as currently practiced could be greatly improved; the academic "game" is rigged against those without academic affiliations or with academic affiliations that are not from R1 universities; the idea of open access is good, but the exact way in which it will be funded is still unclear (this I think was the point of your Elsevier story on page 5 where Elsevier's stock price went up *after* open access since now they were getting paid by the government plus still getting library subscription fees (it was the government that paid right? not the individual authors).

My only question/quibble is in the larger picture will having a better peer review system really have that big an impact on the progress of science, steering humanity to a "good" state, etc.? Aren't there more important factors to focus on? I just say this to play devil's advocate since as a theoretical physicist my main output in science is through what I publish so this is an extremely important point to me. But I am also reminded of a student-athlete at my university who once told me that the best thing to advance the goals of the university would be if there was *more* support for athletics on campus. This kind of statement may seem strange unless you spent some time at an American university which not only are academic centers, but also amateur athletic training institutions.

Anyway I like the idea you mention of having peer review be public. Something like post the paper to some electronic archive and then people would post comments/critics of a given work. You might still need to keep the names of the people leaving critics anonymous since people, even those trained in the scientific method, often fall in love with their own ideas and have a hard time hearing even well intended negative things about a given piece of work. It doesn't help that often the criticism is in a tone that can be unnecessarily negative. Also the more people that give some comment on a piece of work the better. Something some journals have done is to list the editor in charge of the particular article along with the final published version. The idea is this then forces the editor to take some responsibility for the quality of those articles accepted. It give another layer of oversight into the quality of the paper since both the referee(s) and the editor have given the paper the OK and the editor even puts their name with the paper. Of course the reverse does not happen -- no one publishes the rejected articles with the name of the editor that rejected them. So there is some asymmetry on this point.

Finally, you might find interesting a recent study of NIH R01 grants published in

N. Danthi, et al. "Percentile Ranking and Citation Impact of a Large Cohort of NHLBI-Funded Cardiovascular R01 Grants", Circulation Research, 114, 302656 (2014)

this study found that there was virtually no difference in the scientific impact of those grants which were ranked Category 1 (excellent grants according to the grant reviewers and which therefore got funded), Category 2 (very good grants according to the grant reviewers but which just missed the funding mark) and Category 3 (fair or marginal grants as judged by the reviewers which also did not get funded). Grants in all three categories published about the same number of articles and received the same number of citations. This is not necessarily the best measure of scientific worth, but it is the metric by which NIH says it judges the grants.

Anyway and interesting and thought provoking essay.

Best,

Doug

Philip,

I overlooked in your reply "the biases of public opinion". Well, public opinion tends to be manipulated. That's why I maintain my objection to your claim "saving the world".

Doesn't already your exemplary selection of expected catastrophes reflect the manipulated public opinion?

Does global warming really deserve much more attention than poisoning the environment with radioactive and other waste?

Can we expect the public opinion to abandon in time the logically untenable slogan "Earth has room and food for all"? While this naive belief might be true for now and the near future but not beyond, it protects the interests of those who are irresponsible and could misuse an open peer-review accordingly because they are strongly interested in their profit.

I would rather appreciate if you could point to a list of viXra articles that proved at least as valuable as arXive articles. I agree on the necessity of scientific discussion on high level. To me in science, nothing must be taboo. Read my essays. Agreeing with outsiders like Nobel and Shannon rather than Einstein and Bourbaki, I do not even expect much ercy by open peers.

Eckard

Phil,

Excellent job.

Probably not a snowballs chance in a Bessemer converter of having any effect, but then a billion snowballs is an avalanche so we must start somewhere. To prove I really mean that I had this published in the 'Skeptical intelligencer' a few years ago;

Subjugation of Skepticism in Science. (I spose I should have logged that into viXra too, whadda'you think?)

Of course there are twofold problems; that one man's genius is another man's crackpot as all think differently, and we already have 'information overload' with the number of papers that DO get through (I have a growing pile of unread journals building up despite reading 20 papers a week). Overcome those problems and the ruling troglodyte hordes who have it all sewn up may start to worry.

I note 'Nature' has recently be lauded for heading the other way and insisting all references are from only the landed gentry of peers. Only marriages to sisters are allowed! You may be right, the problem may now be starting to be one of mankind's very survival.

I've had Vladimirs problems too. Some papers on arXiv, then suddenly a brick wall. Do they not also have any code of ethics? Unifying QM and SR mean nothing if nobody will publish it! (I hope you'll check out my essay).

I greatly commend your efforts to beat Christian's record as the highest scoring community peer score to be passed over in the judging. Well done and best of luck.

Peter

Philip: better peer-review would surely help. I think a key element is expansion of "blind peer review" so reviewers don't know author names. The power of ad-hom prejudice is great. Meanwhile, viXra helps by providing an open forum for challenging ideas.

Heh, clever coincidance, this was my legitimacy test:

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