The Academic Caesar by Steve Fuller

Author:Steve Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Published: 2016-08-27T13:30:08.673296+00:00

2 Peer review: key to knowledge as a public good or the academic guild’s last stand?

1 Introduction and Overview of the Argument

Peer review is an easy – and to a large extent justified – target for cynicism on the part of both aspiring Academic Caesars and neo-liberal policymakers. To be sure, most non-academics encounter ‘peer review’ as a quality control signal in knowledge production. However, for the academics themselves, it can feel like an exquisite combination of blackmail and extortion. On the blackmail side, academics wishing to publish in a certain field know in advance that they have no chance of acceptance unless their work formally acknowledges the work of a specific range of researchers. On the extortion side, academics who have undergone peer review may be told that a condition of publication is not simply to address clear errors and inadequacies but in addition to incorporate considerations of specific interest to the reviewer, which under normal circumstances would be regarded as a needless burden.

Nevertheless, amid the variously lodged calls for academic inquiry to be more ‘open sourced’ and ‘publicly oriented’, it has been common for both supporters and opponents of the neo-liberal ‘mode 2’ knowledge production to agree on the inviolability of ‘peer review’ as a core academic value. Indeed, nowadays the tendency especially among the critics of neo-liberalism is to portray peer review, under the guise of ‘mutual accountability’, as a mark of solidarity and collective resistance against larger forces in the political economy that threaten to compromise academic freedom (Boden and Epstein 2011). From the standpoint pursued in this chapter, such an overestimation of peer review may be seen as sounding the death rattle of the academic guild mentality. As a matter of fact, the value of peer review in the larger political economy of knowledge production is rather circumscribed and typically conservative in effect. Insofar as peer review can be harnessed to some sort of progressive ends in the neo-liberal academy, it should be in full cognizance of its limitations.

Peer review serves both an epistemic and a moral function, which are quite distinct but easily confused in ways that mystify its significance in academic inquiry – or ‘science’, in the broad wissenschaftlich sense. Epistemically, peer review ‘validates’ in the sense of granting a licence to a scientist to draw on a discipline’s body of knowledge to advance her own knowledge claims. Ethically, peer review signals to the larger public the discipline’s trust that the scientist did what she claims to have done. Thus, fraud is seen as the biggest offence against the peer review process. Nevertheless, the history of science reveals that fraud has a complicated – sometimes quite positive – relationship to the advancement of knowledge.

There is an equally complicated relationship between the classical sociological model of peer review – namely, the self-organizing Royal Society – and the advancement of knowledge. In particular, this model works better for retrospective than prospective epistemic judgements. It is easier to tell whether new research carries on than breaks with old research.

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