|Peter Boettke|
We often talk about the marketplace of ideas to reflect the contestation of ideas that constitutes the scientific enterprise. Science is hard work, and being wrong in science should, and often does, hurt. Reputations are won and loss, job prospects either emerge or vanish, research funds flow or dry up, and bright graduate students are either attracted to work with you, or flock to others.
But the scientific process only works when error is exposed and the incentives are structured so that scientist learn from their errors and correct those errors. Just as in a market economy when we privatize the profits, but socialize the losses we get dysfunction, in the marketplace of ideas if the discipline of science is prevented from impacting on scientific behavior we will have dysfunction.
Science magainze published the results of a study where online/open access journals did not fare as well as one would expect in catching error and demanding correction. The study raises serious questions about the scientific process, and the answers are not as straightforward as Science might be implying. For readers of a certain age, the Sokal affair will set off certain bells and that had nothing to do with online/open access, but on the intellectual standards of argument in scholarly affairs.
This is troubling, indeed. It seems, though, that the author of this piece underplays the criticism that he relates at the end: non-open-access journals might well come to the same result.
It seems that sending it to these journals as well would have made for a control group to compare the open-access journals with.
If the claim is right -- both types of journals are error-ridden -- would this not weaken your claim that privatizing the gains (from acceptances) but socializing the losses, or in this case (I would amend that) nullifying the losses (from rejections)?
Posted by: Harry David | October 08, 2013 at 11:01 AM