With all its merits, the traditional model of anonymous peer review clearly has flaws; reviewers under the convenient cloak of anonymity can use the system to settle scores, old boys’ clubs can conspire to prevent research from seeing the light of day, and established orthodox reviewers and editors can potentially squelch speculative, groundbreaking work. In the world of open science and science blogging, all these flaws can be – and have been – potentially addressed.
In addition to these ‘formal’ scientific interactions via academic publishers, there is also communication amongst scientists. For instance, early PhD students, who are still in the process of learning about the business of doing science, may be looking for advice from mentors and other more experienced scientists. Unfortunately, when the talk comes to controversial areas of science, students are often discouraged from getting involved in non-mainstream research (note, however, Avi Loeb’s opposite advice). This begins with the commonly expressed belief that such research might “hurt your career”, but sometimes even more direct warnings are made. For example, a few years ago a professor told me that he would never hire someone who has published even a paper on MOND. A fellow PhD student got a similar piece of “advice” while visiting a different university, where one scientist advised him that he should only publish results which are negative for MOND, but nothing in support of it.
If this is happening in physics, I shudder to think what’s happening the the softer sciences. Are they even producing results correlated with truth anymore?
Kind of follow-up to the old does blind review slow down science post:
-- the-curious-wavefunction
Actually found cited on the dark matter crisis by Pavel Kroupa where he gvies concrete examples:
If this is happening in physics, I shudder to think what’s happening the the softer sciences. Are they even producing results correlated with truth anymore?