Open online science emerges to make prominent the links loved by experts and inquirers. This new selection process is a gift of the internet that is fundamentally superior to peer review by a selected few of articles before they are published. To illustrate how network laws affect online study subjects, I keep posting the Los Alamos Map of Science, as I have above, because it is an image of actual network emergence online. It illustrates the citations experts in their fields have made to articles that augment or enforce their work.
Setting aside our own views on global warming, it is instructive to compare network emergence to peer review, as it is critiqued by Martin Kozlowski’s illustration inserted in the image above. In the future will selected scientists continue “write the book” by judging their peers? Or will every shade of opinion compete in the open network where the most respected ideas will rise to prominence? I think the latter.
Here is a pertinent bit from today’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece where I found the Kozlowski drawing:
But there’s something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a “pollutant.”
The bible I’m referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It’s our canon, and it’s all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.
[emphasis mine]
The time is long overdue for scientists and experts in all academic fields to no longer turn their backs on the network laws that have made peer review obsolete.
