James, I'm glad you are thinking about how to implement this. One reason why I have not tried to do anything like this myself is that to succeed any project needs the backing of academics. Otherwise you will not get the right people to do the peer-review for the reasons I mentioned in the essay. Everyone's opinion should count but most research is still done withing the professional academic world and they need to be behind it. I dont want to invest my time and effort in something unless I know there is good backing.

Things are slow. http://episciences.org/ looked good a year ago and still could work but I don't know why progress on that has been so slow. There is also open peer-review opening up at http://www.researchgate.net/ but I think they will be vulnerable to take over like Mendeley was. http://www.philica.com/ was a nice try but they were not open to outsiders and did not have the backing from the insiders.

The new one that I like a lot now is http://www.openscholar.org.uk/ That is the one to get behind right now. They have all the right ideas and attitudes.

Hi Philip,

I love your article and gave it the "10" it deserves. You've brought a lot of vital concepts to the fore, and I hope that you win the contest because of it. I hope that open peer review becomes standard practice someday, for so many reasons, and because it really could save the world. All the best!

Warmly,

Aaron

Dear Philip

Your essay is well written and organized. Your topic is well developed and controversial. Overall, I agree with some of parts of your essay, I just would like to express a couple of disagreements.

First, I do not think changing the peer-review process is an important factor that will steer the future. High quality research will always prevail over bad quality research no matter what judging process we adopt. Bias and subjective opinions are intrinsic human characteristics that cannot be eliminated. We see this everywhere.

Second, I think that the present peer-review system is the most solid. Science has a reputation gained over some centuries and it will not jeopardize it by changing its peer-review process. Your proposal, specially principle 3) will reduce the quality of research. And we see this in your repository. On average the quality of research published in vixra is inferior when compared to that one published in arxiv. Arxiv's policies (such as endorsement) guarantee a minimum of quality in research because most people are experts in their fields. Manuscripts that do not meet the minimum quality standards should be rejected. By contrast, in vixra, one can find many articles with very poor quality. In my opinion this is the reason vixra is not well seen in the academy. This is something I regret you do not discuss in your essay.

Likewise, traditional journals vs open-access journals. The average quality of research published in traditional journals is far superior than that one published in open-access journals where as long as you pay the publication fee, your manuscript will be published even without a peer-review process. In my opinion open-access journals has gained a negative reputation due to their unethical practices. If these practices continue, my prediction is that they will all disappear by the end of the decade.

Also regarding your third principle, if I do research in a field, I would like to be criticized by someone who knows about that topic but not by a layman who doesn't know the rudiments. Just in the same way, I would not criticize a musician for playing an instrument that I do not even know how to play. One can only criticize something if one has enough knowledge about it.

Exams are filters to select the best for a given activity. It is not a method of suppression. What you call suppression, I would call it filtering in favor of higher quality in research.

You: Wikipedia is a good example of a system that allows anyone to contribute.

I wish this were true...

Anyway. I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to read and comment on my thread.

Best Regards

Israel

    I think the best way to favour expertise in the reviews is to weight peoples opinions according to how well they themselves score in their own work on similar subjects. It should be a bit like the Google ranking system. Making that work well is difficult but picking experts by hand introduces unwanted bias into the system and should be avoided.

    I have not thought about coding biases into RDF/OWL. It is an intriguing idea.

    People studying the effect of cognitive bias in finance have looked at why it happens and when it can be an advantage. the answers are complicated and I am no expert, but in part it is just simpler to think that way. It may have evolved before we had the ability to perform more logical thinking. Sometimes it does work out OK, but often it does not. A lot of money has been lost by banks due to bad bias and the effect on the impact of science is liekly to be similar.

    I disagree that academics matter less than businessmen. Businesses have short term goals to make money. Academic research aims to solve longterm problems for the common good. Big pharam do not do much research into new antibiotics because it is not cost effective. Finding cures for rare diseases does not make money. More money is made by finding tablets that alleviate hay fever and dandruff and they make even more money if they just treat the symptoms temporarily rather than curing it. Businesses are good at improving technology once the basic principles are known. Academics are needed to make the important breakthroughs.

    High quality research will always prevail in the longterm, but sometimes it takes longer to form the concensus that it should. For issues affecting our future time is critical. This is why the peer-review system has to be more efficient and reliable. It is no good discovering that a drug does not work after it has been sold to millions of people. Peer-review in medicine is particularly bad. Bias and subjective reason can be much improved by good opne peer-review.

    I think you have missed the point about how viXra works and the principles it uses. This essay was not about viXra and you can read more on the viXra site, e.g. in the info link and FAQ. Nobody denies that viXra has some low quality material. viXra does not decide what should be rejected. It just decides that nothing should be hidden by people who might be biased. Acceptance is a matter for peer-review and that is done outside viXra.

    Not all open-access journals accept only for a fee. there are some bad open-access journals and there are some bad paywalled ones too. the way the current system works is that people gte to know the journal rankings and judge papers on that basis. This is a very crude system and part of the point of open peer-review is to make that better.

    I am obviously not saying that peer-review that is done by non-experts is as good. The point is that anyone should be able to have a say. Sometimes the establishment opinion is biased and has to be corrected. Your example of a musical instrument is an interesting one. I think that people who do cannot play musical instruments are often very good at judging the quality of a player. Sometimes the experts who can themselves play are too focused on technical ability whereas the non-expert just listens to how good it sounds. People dont play instruments just to please their peers. For the same reason a jury ina criminal trial is chosen from laypeople, while expert lawyers explain to them the law. Academic research is not quite the same but it is still the case that outsiders can play an important part in the judgment as well as the research.

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    • Post #86

    Philip,

    It seems a lot of these entries are about method. Peer review, voting, enhancing education, frame of mind, framing the question etc. A lot also take a very science oriented and futuristic perspective. My problem with all this is that it doesn't necessarily deal directly with the actual issues involved, for the very basic reason that the real problems facing us do elicit a great deal of emotion, we all have varying points of view on many of them and there is no objective perspective to which we have access. The fact is that when we do try to materially change complex situations, the result isn't necessarily better, both because there are no clear objectives and often various people are working more for their own good, than the larger community. As W.B. Yeats put it, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

    Now I am an avid reader of the news and commentary for many years and I do feel a pressing issue about how the world is run, is that in order for a functioning economy to work, it needs a fairly neutral medium of exchange, a monetary playing field, so to speak, yet what we have is one which functions are the major player in the economy, to the extent that the primary economic function has now become to produce these units of exchange. The function of capitalism has become to produce capital. As it serves to pull this notational value out of every possible source, it creates a siphon effect, that must further extract real value out of all aspects of life, from social and civil relations, to the environment.

    My argument is that while we have come to think of money as a commodity, it is in fact a contract and if we were to begin to understand it in this context, it would change the essential economic paradigm.

    For one thing, if people realized they no more owned those pieces of paper in their pockets, then they owned the section of road they happened to be traveling on, there would be much less incentive to draw value out of society and the environment, in order to acquire these notational promises. Such that then we would begin to see society and the environment as legitimate stores of value and not just as resources to be mined. Then people wouldn't need to save as much for needs such as elder and youth care, primary education and many of those other needs which historically were social functions in the first place. Even forms of local currencies could grow around many of these needs and keep the value within the community and not have it skimmed off by international banks.

    With the current financial system, risk is public and reward is privatized, yet the greed of those managing this system is serving to rapidly cook their own golden goose. As I see it, this will open up a significant opportunity for change, given that the solution to all the prior breakdowns in the system, with the government creating ever looser credit and buying the debt to do so, will eventually create a mess too big to paper over.

    So this presents both goal and opportunity. How would you judge it as a method for steering humanity, in your peer review system?

    Regards,

    John Merryman

      Causally, everything is a set of interconnected systems of perspectives that are formed from interrelated relationships. So nothing is an isolated perspective, they tend to bleed together and overlap. Especially when "choosing" to isolate some usually non-dominant influences to make the perspective easier to monitor and manipulate.

      I do not believe Phil's cited relationships will guide humanity into the future solely on their own merits. But I think they are important as part of a larger effort.

      For all of the essays here, none of them are sufficient on their own to guide the future of humanity. However, "collectively" I see where many of the concepts can be fit together to form a larger actionable effort that indeed could guide the future of humanity relative to broad technological developments.

      Do you really want to Steer the Future of Humanity and take action today?

      Force the NSA to be managed ethically.

      Maximize Freedoms and at the same time Maximize Security, do not give up one to have the other. Corruption uses the shifting of Security policies to unethically and illegally allocate resources and/or opportunities.

      I know a little about the NSA and there is a lot of internal turmoil right now and a great deal of pressure from Representatives; some of which is promoting the release of information to Corporate controlled entities for what THOSE Representatives consider ethical oversight; i.e. promoting Corruption and acting in the interests of Treason.

      This will hinder broad economic development because dominant corporations will further dominate significant opportunities. This translates to a suffering research budget.

      Treason defined as "intentional weakening of security" for the unethical/illegal allocation of resources/opportunities

      .

      .

      .

      retweet: Part of Civil Rights is that Representation is free of Rep/Dem Treason http://tinyurl.com/lpqsur5

      .

      .

      .

      Write Reps & NSA, rare opportunity right now to force NSA to monitor and publicly report all acts of corruption/treason

      Dear Philip

      Thanks for your reply. In my view, your repository has created itself a deplorable reputation over the years thanks to its policies specially those related to the quality of the material published there. As I said, low and high quality research can be identified only by experts no matter the judging process. To me it is bias to say that vixra has been suppressed when, in fact, publications in vixra don't meet the minimum quality standards.

      If you would like vixra to be cited and accepted by research institutions and reputable journals, you would have to solve the quality issue. In order to do this, you would have to implement filters similar to arxiv. But since vixra was created for EVERYONE (expert or not), I don't see how vixra will achieve this.

      You: This is why the peer-review system has to be more efficient and reliable.

      Current peer-review is ok despite its cons. For the reasons given in my previous post, I do not think your proposal will help to improve it.

      You: It is no good discovering that a drug does not work after it has been sold to millions of people.

      I think it is not wise to blame a reviewer or journal, and therefore, the peer-review system, for a drug that does not work.

      You: I think you have missed the point about how viXra works and the principles it uses.

      I know vixra very well.

      You: The point is that anyone should be able to have a say.

      No, not anyone but only qualified and recognized people, experts in a given field. If "anyone" would like to have a say, anyone would have to meet the minimum quality requirements. That's why there are institutions and research centers where people acquire the minimum requirements to have a say.

      Good luck in the contest!

      Best Regards

      Israel

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      • Post #91

      Israel, there are a lot of people who say the same things as you but it is because they have failed to see how the now paradigm for publications works. Anyone can publish now, on a blog or an e-book or whatever. It is not possible to filter out low quality material as journals used to do in the past. I see this as a good thing because in the past a lot of good papers were delayed or hidden by the old system. It does not do harm that bad papers can be read by the public. The harm comes when people wrongly judge a good paper to be bad or a bad paper to be good. That is the business for peer-review to sort out.

      viXra does not try to build a reputation for quality. It never has and it never will. This is written on the web site in several places and I have lost count of the number of times I have said it in response to this kind of criticism. You cannot judge any paper on viXra merely by the fact that that is where it is, because viXra is open to anything (except documents that are off-topic and where legal issues intervene) People are gradually starting to understand this and the quantity of papers we receive is rising at about 40% per year. I do not monitor quality but my general impression is that the ratio of useful science to junk on viXra is also increasing. People still sometimes try to mock us by pointing to low quality papers they find there but that is because they are behind the wave and have not yet got the idea of how to surf it.

      viXra works on the principle that publication is completely separate from peer-review. The traditional system says otherwise but that is the old dogma and the new publication paradigm usurps it. Some people will never get the new way but more are waking up to it. viXra is just one small part of the change that is happening. The bigger picture is open peer-review which is now following on the tail of open access publication.

      It is difficult to gauge how many people are coming over to the new concept but there are signs that lots of people are. Your old idea that people need to have qualifications to have a say is a dying one. The UK government has offered a £10 million prize to anyone who can make progress on a problem that threatens humanity (climate change, resistant bugs etc) They have asked the public to decide what issue to tackle and are encouraging anyone to compete for the prize, whether academic, corporation or just independent scientist/inventor, it does not matter. Some people say that this is the wrong approach but they are doing it because other public prizes have already worked and they want to see how far the idea can be taken.

      Of course expertise and qualifications will always be important for research but you also have to count the paths that do not follow the classical route, as in Douglas Singleton's path integral metaphor.

      Some new experiments in publication do try to restrict their input to academics. I think those are the systems that will ultimately fail, not the open repositories like viXra. Philica is already sinking because it tried to set a minimum quality standard for submission and failed. I think arXiv will ultimately find that its filter is its biggest limitation. Microsoft's Academic search also failed miserably because they restricted its scope too much. Google scholar does better because they accept papers from almost anywhere. They bowed to pressure from academics to filter out viXra but as our scope grows they will either have to change that or they will suffer for the omission. Figshare has no filter and is doing very well. viXra is boomimg despite actively setting itself up as the place for arXiv rejects and encouraging anyone to submit. A filter is not a prerequisite for success. Journals used to be open to anyone but now they are quietly starting to filter out submissions from academic outsiders without even reading the papers. They are part of the old paradigm and if they cant find a new business model based on the new one they will die. Open access, Open publication and Open peer review are the future.

      I wish you good luck in the contest too.

      Philip,

      Thank you for a very interesting essay. I found your list of biases particularly to the point, because I agree with you that finding ways to minimize the effect of biases (by improving peer review and by other means) is crucial if we want humanity to optimally steer the future. Being aware of biases and actively fighting them is certainly one of the main goals that education should aim at, especially in the futurocentric perspective that I propose in my essay.

      Good luck in the contest!

      Marc

      Dear Phillip

      It is said that nowadays we are in the age of information just because by clicking we have access to whatever we like, good or bad. The fact that we have access won't change the perception of quality in research. There is a list of more than 200 new open-access journals in physics with a terrible reputation. People who seek quality in research will go to places were good quality is published, the others will be ignored, simply because there is too much information that one cannot handle it all and visit all websites. I'm not saying that all publications in vixra are not good, I'm just saying that vixra does not guarantee a minimum of quality. So, there is no big difference between vixra and any other blog find in the internet.

      Please take a look at this manuscript: http://vixra.org/pdf/1405.0315v1.pdf. Look at the graphs, presentation, etc. Perhaps this manuscript has something interesting to say but the quality speaks for itself. This is not science. A professional will never publish a paper like this one. When arxiv started to receive this kind of manuscripts, its quality and reputation started to reduce, that's why arxiv implemented filters. Arxiv maintains good quality standards as a repository. This is the great difference between vixra and arxiv.

      You: Your old idea that people need to have qualifications to have a say is a dying one.

      I don't think so. One cannot expect that a layman who doesn't know basic calculus solve a problem that requires knowledge in differential geometry or higher mathematics. I'm afraid your example does not apply to physics or any other science.

      You: The UK government... ...it does not matter.

      I'm sure a layperson will not win the prize.

      You: They are part of the old paradigm and if they cant find a new business model based on the new one they will die. Open access, Open publication and Open peer review are the future.

      I think, there is no "new one" at all. Open access is not well established yet and I don't think it will. It has shown to be worse than traditional publication and it is jeopardizing science reputation by publishing bad quality science. Lets see if you are right in the following years!

      Best Regards

      Israel

      Dear Tihamer,

      The group Nicolas Bourbaki claimed having made set theory the basis of all mathematics; and they were accepted in textbooks and by teachers of mathematics.

      Claude Shannon has been known and respected for information theory. However, his view on past and future as well as Alfred Nobel's view on mathematics were at odds with current tenets. See my previous essay too.

      When I wrote outsider, I didn't mean the opposite of insider but someone outside of the mainstream.

      What about your three suggested crucial technologies, I think your optimistic approach is better than pessimism. You might just be a bit too optimistic. Anyway, we both will perhaps agree on that technology is not our fate, not our destiny but rather a challenge to everybody everywhere: Let's contribute to the preconditions for intelligent and satisfying life in peace as intended by Alfred Nobel!

      Regards,

      Eckard

      Dear Phillip,

      You discuss the topic of open peer review thoroughly, and while important, I do not think it is enough. This is because many policy makers suffer from one or more of your listed (and other) biases, and they make the decisions that steer humanity, for better or worse. Unless you address their biases, merely creating a pool of 'objectively true' information is of limited use. Consider the matter of climate change.

      I suggest three further biases to be important: Attention bias: There is just so much data to attend to that critical information is often overlooked. We tend to attend to things we attend to. Deciding what to attend to, deciding what is important, is often the most difficult decision. Policy makers often attend to the concerns of their supporters, rather than the objective demands of reality, yet which is more important, and critical?

      This suggests another bias: Investment bias: You tend to believe what you are paid to believe.

      And a third is locality bias: You tend to believe what is near and immediate is more important than what is distant in space and/or time. This bias must be overcome if we are to develop truly global solutions.

      Hmm: Checking the WEB shows a more complete list of biases to be quite long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biases_in_judgment_and_decision_making

      but this merely emphasizes your main point.

      In a democracy, we are supposedly all peers, but a democratic system of review has its own failings. Some sort of filtration and transformation of data and information is necessary. Imperfections in the evaluation system should be sought out and corrected, and complaints addressed. And we should all do our part to help.

      A very readable and coherent essay, though.

      Good luck in the contest.

      Sincerely,

      Charles

        Charles, thanks for your interesting points.

        I agree that a traditional democracy is not the solution for open peer-review. I do think that the process has to be open to comments from all-comers, but that does not mean the truth is decided by a democratic vote. Some kind of up-down voting system may be part of the solution but it has to be applied to individual points and comments so that a collective logic can be formed. I think that if someone points out a biased argument or provides a more logical alternative then some people recognize that. The system needs to find the experts who are best at judging in a particular field and give them more power in that field. I dont know the best way to make it work. I think it requires some experiment.

        Hi Philip,

        I just wanted to reach out and say thank you for the consideration you put into your work. I, too, am an advocate for transparency in the sciences (whether institutional or otherwise), as anything else is obstructive to the sort of progress humanity may need, in order to evade the many existential threats you were attentive enough to mention. Thank you for that, and for an otherwise very well-written, and well-thought-out discussion (both in your essay and throughout the comments that followed it).

        Wishing you well in the competition, and hoping to hear from you soon.

        Best regards.

        =)

        Dear Philip,

        I've commented on your fine essay above, but as you were favorably inclined to Douglas Singleton's application of a physics metaphor to the problem, I'd like to again invite you to read my essay, which also applies physics ideas to the topic.

        Congratulations for continuing to stay near the top of the rankings.

        Best,

        Edwin Eugene Klingman