ReproducibiliTea Online: Is Peer Review a Good Idea?

The seventeenth OSCR ReproducibiliTea journal club will take place on June 16th at 11:00 CEST. Our special guest will be Prof. Remco Heesen, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia and also faculty member at the University of Groningen.

Remco will guide us through one of his papers¹:

Heesen, R., & Bright, L. K. (2020). Is Peer Review a Good Idea? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz029

In this paper², the authors discuss benefits and downsides of prepublication and postpublication peer review and argue that the latter is preferable. Reasoning from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism, the effects that abolishing prepublication peer review may have on the social structure of science – in particular the incentive structure and its effects on the behavior of individual scientists – are either positive or neutral. Based on present evidence, abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo.

An invitation via Outlook calendar has been sent to researchers in the OSCR mailing list³. This email includes a link to join the meeting remotely using Zoom. Click on the link, insert the password provided in the invitation mail, and you will join the call.

During the Zoom meeting, please follow these guidelines:

• wear headphones
• mute your microphone
• video is optional (in case of connection issues, you may be asked to turn it off)
• pay attention to the moderator (which will be Antonio)
• if you have questions
  • click on the Raise Hand button and the moderator will unmute you; or
  • write down your question in the chat and the moderator will read it

Please remember that attendees of every OSCR event (in-person or online) are required to follow our Code of Conduct.

Take care,

Remco Heesen and Antonio Schettino