It is often said that peer review is one of the pillars of scientific research. It is also well known that peer review doesn't actually do its job very well, and, every few years, people like me start writing articles about alternatives to peer review. This isn't one of those rants. Instead, I'm going to focus on something that is probably less well known: peer review actually has two jobs. It's used to provide minimal scrutiny for new scientific results, and to act as a gatekeeper for funding agencies.
What I would like to do here is outline some of the differences between peer review in these two jobs and the strengths and weaknesses of peer review in each case. This is not a rant against peer review, nor should it be—I have been pretty successful in both publications and grant applications over the last couple of years. But I think it's worth exploring the idea that peer review functions much better in the case of deciding the value of scientific research than it does when acting as a gatekeeper for scientific funding.
How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1328.html
http://wc3.worldcrossing.com/webx?14@@.1de35bad/13
Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews publishes specially commissioned review articles designed to bring together under one cover, current advances in the ever broadening field of renewable and sustainable energy. The coverage of the journal includes the following areas:
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•Bioenergy
•Geothermal
•Hydrogen
•Hydropower
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Applications and Services
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Policy
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Environmental Impact and Sustainability
Regional Focused Coverage of Renewable Energy
Green CS, Bavelier D.
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. csgreen@umn.edu
Human beings have an amazing capacity to learn new skills and adapt to new environments. However, several obstacles remain to be overcome in designing paradigms to broadly improve quality of life. Arguably, the most notable impediment to this goal is that learning tends to be quite specific to the trained regimen and does not transfer to even qualitatively similar tasks. This severely limits the potential benefits of learning to daily life. This review discusses training regimens that lead to the acquisition of new knowledge and strategies that can be used flexibly across a range of tasks and contexts. Possible characteristics of training regimens are proposed that may be responsible for augmented learning, including the manner in which task difficulty is progressed, the motivational state of the learner, and the type of feedback the training provides. When maximally implemented in rehabilitative paradigms, these characteristics may greatly increase the efficacy of training.
D. Taraborelli (2008), Soft peer review. Social software and distributed scientific evaluation, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP 08), Carry-Le-Rouet, France, May 20-23, 2008
Preise, Stipendien, Projekte: Deutschlands Wissenschaftsförderer vergeben viele Millionen und lenken Schicksale. Die Gutachter-Arbeit leisten die netten Peers von nebenan - ist doch Ehrensache. Dafür winkt kein Geld, höchstens Ruhm und Fleißkärtchen. Wie lange geht das noch gut?