In the Chair:
Jon Clark (Dean of Social Sciences)
Discussants:
Brief statement of the arguments:
STEVAN HARNAD:
Peer Review is Medium-Independent: Like Democracy, Flawed, But Preferable to Any Alternatives Yet Proposed and Tested.
Human nature being what it is, we will always be guilty of making imperfect judgments. Yet in some circumtances, judge we must, and in others we must rely on the judgments of experts. No one with a seriously sick loved one would dream of basing their treatment on opinions aired by one and all on a health chat show. In life or death matters, we rely on the expert medical research literature. What makes this literature expert? It is that what appears has first been refereed by qualified specialists. Now ask yourself: Is my own area of human inquiry so much less serious and important than human health that it does not merit equally rigorous scrutiny and filtering? And while you're at it, on another point of human nature, ask yourself how hard most of us would work in preparing our papers -- or in doing anything, for that matter -- if we were not answerable to anyone for our output. For it is a fact that most of the published scholarly/scientific literature is cited by no one and read by almost as few. So if it were indeed made into an unfiltered academic chat show, most authors would escape any consequences -- except that the literature would become completely un-navigable, as no one would know what was worth reading and believing and attempting to build upon -- unless we were willing to entrust to popularity polls the gate-keeping authority for which we had previously relied on qualified experts. All these truths, if true, are medium-independent. The Net, with all its revolutionary possibilities for advancing human inquiry, does not provide an alternative to peer review, but at best only the possibility of supplementing it with commentary -- both expert and inexpert.
FRED NASH:
Yes, but...: For the question is: Who is one's peer? and where is the gate?
Please indicticate willingness to attend
in writing by 22nd March to
Comments (up to 1000 words), giving your own details and contact address,
should be sent to
Fred Nash, psd@soton.ac.uk
Last changed 6th February 1996; input: 8th February 1996.