25 MAY 2015 by ideonexus

 Brian Christian: Scientific Knowledge Should Be Structure...

In my view, what's most outmoded within science, most badly in need of retirement, is the way we structure and organize scientific knowledge itself. Academic literature, even as it moves online, is a relic of the era of typesetting, modeled on static, irrevocable, toothpaste-out-of-the-tube publication. Just as the software industry has moved from a "waterfall" process to an "agile" process—from monolithic releases shipped from warehouses of mass-produced disks to over-the-air differential ...
Folksonomies: peer review
Folksonomies: peer review
  1  notes
03 SEP 2011 by ideonexus

 How Peer Review Hurts Science

In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which proposals rather than proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster visited upon the scientific community in this century. No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me he thought I was making a big mistake. He supported me because he knew my track record was good. I believe that U.S. science could recover from the stultifying effects of decades of misguided peer reviewing...
Folksonomies: peer review
Folksonomies: peer review
  1  notes

An interesting argument that the peer review process hurts science because ideas are evaluated by themselves, while the track record of the scientist should be considered.