Open Peer Review: New Rule

• 10 November 2011
• grousing,
• publishing

New rule! From this moment forward, in anything claiming to be a “discussion” of open peer review, no one is allowed to refer to the Nature experiment as evidence that open review can’t work, at least not unless you simultaneously demonstrate (a) that you’re aware of at least one experiment in which it worked quite well (hey, wait; the results were even reproducible!) and (b) that you’ve read at least one text that asks a question or two about the Nature experiment’s presuppositions, and thus its scientific merit. We can call this the Fitzpatrick variant of Godwin’s Law; once Nature gets trotted out, it’s evident that you’re not interested in a real discussion.

That is all.

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