Shifting toward 'open peer review'

By Alex O. Holcombe, Professor, School of Psychology, University of Sydney

Twenty years ago, it was difficult to find information about local restaurants, except from the restaurants themselves. Now, thanks to the Internet, independent evaluations are easy to find. It’s past time we make that the case for scientific research, too.

At its frontier, science is unpolished and uneven. The findings come from new machines or procedures. Often these are not fully understood – as Einstein is claimed to have said: “if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research”.

Humility is thus important, but you won’t always find it in the popular accounts…

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