Open Peer Review to Save the World by Philip Gibbs

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:

Important: In order to combat spam, please select the letter in this menu between 'V' and 'X':

Phil,

An interesting paper here, not only showing a far higher proportion of experiments than we realise are falsely based, but then applauding treating the symptoms not the cause;

"In 2005 John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist from Stanford University, caused a stir with a paper showing why, as a matter of statistical logic, the idea that only one such paper in 20 gives a false-positive result was hugely optimistic. Instead, he argued, "most published research findings are probably false."

As he told the quadrennial International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, held this September in Chicago, the problem has not gone away."

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble">2013 Economist article.](https://

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble)

It also refers to the Nature policy.

Peter

Philip,

I would like to see your essay win this year. I am among the many independent researchers, like yourself, that experienced many years of bias. Your essay explained why for 30 years I either received curt rejections from an editorial staff or worse no response from my many attempts to contribute or even dialog. I spent a very enjoyable day reviewing your copious contributions to viXra. Thank you for starting the website. I put some thought into how to set up a peer review process and started to appreciate the difficulties. My motivation has been developing a consistent view of nature and I am concerned about where our valuable future mental resources will be spent. My grandkids will probably love the challenge of understanding as much as I did but I don't want them exposed to processes that limit their potential. We have a lot of challenges ahead and we need a world that stops fighting and wasting resources over trivial differences. I am struck by statements from authors saying that only a small fraction of people even believe in evolution of other basic science. Your statements that a good peer review process might change the future are right on.

Philip,

Wonderful to read your views on the need for Open Peer Review. I have felt this way for a very long time.

We are on the same page.

While you are opening up the world to grow its knowledge, I am working to make this knowledge available to the global public.

I eagerly await your reaction to my essay.

Thank you for your essay

-Ajay

Philip,

"Humanity faces many dangers from climate change and wars to asteroid impacts that could harm our future. Often logical reasoning does not seem to play a strong part in discussions on such subjects and even peer-review is flawed. I contend that the solution is a better system of open peer-review."

Certainly "open peer-review" is a step in the right direction in giving hearings to outside-the-moneyed-box ideas, but currently the problem seems to be money, power and access controls who is heard and who is not heard, and this is becoming global, not just a US characteristic. Without celebrity, power and access and without support by a corporate media, without representation by leaders, it is very difficult to be heard.

Climate change and wars too often fulfill agendas of the most powerful in our world. Their focus is not asteroid dangers, though open discussion in an open-peer-review forum would help. We do need to have the best ideas heard, but they are often drowned out by the oligarchy.

A repository like arXiv can be one part of change but the other part is a common effort by the growing legions of the oppressed whose clarion call need to drown out the monolithic establishment that a relentless conservative effort has already brought about. An equally relentless effort can make reason be heard and reasonable ideas applied.

Unfortunately money and power now rule not ideas or their practical application.

Repositories put me in mind of an academic setting which is becoming more influenced by the privatization movement, too often rendering some academicians compromised as well.

Good ideas and good points but I wonder what catastrophe must befall us before rationality can return. The Great Recession didn't do it. In some ways Wall Street is worse -- We needed WWII and the Depression in the 20th Century to bring the upsurge of the middle class.

What do you think, Phil?

Jim