[GOAL] Re: Peer review, OA, etc.

[Jan Velterop]

Mike, 

I totally accept that your discipline suffers from practitioners of "psychoceramics", a field of study involving "cracked pots" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_S._Carberry – tomorrow, as every Friday the 13th, it's "Josiah Stinkney Carberry day"). It's probably true of many disciplines, and it's certainly a well-known phenomenon in physics, where highly fantastic theories about the universe and everything abound. Yet ArXiv seems to be able to keep those crackpots out with a fairly simple – and cheap – endorsement system: http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement. Would this really be impossible in archaeology? It may well not be completely fail-safe, but then, what in life is? To all intents and purposes, we know that ArXiv works. 

Jan Velterop

On 12 Jan 2012, at 16:46, Michael Smith wrote:

> I would not presume to talk about the value of peer review for all of science, but for some fields it is absolutely essential. I am a archaeologist, and we desperately need peer review to weed out papers by two groups of authors (many of whom can write scholarly-sounding and scholarly-looking papers). First we lunatics who would like to think they are part of the scholarly discipline. They are into Maya prophesies for 2012, boatloads of Egyptians who (supposedly) showed the Incas how to mummify the dead, phony pyramids in the Balkans,  and the like. Some of these people write books and articles that appear to be scholarly, but are not. The second group is more insidious. These are scholars with valid degrees who have a very non-scientific epistemology, producing stories of the past with little plausibility. Taking a more humanities-oriented approach, they are willing to propose interpretations that the more scientifically-minded of us consider baseless speculation.
>  
> High-energy physics presumably has fewer lunatics and hangers-on than archaeology, and they are probably easier to spot. We desperately need peer review to keep some sort of sanity in our field.
>  
> Mike
>  
> Michael E. Smith, Professor
> School of Human Evolution & Social Change
> Arizona State University
> www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9
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