First Post: On Academic Service

Check out my thoughts on modern peer review. I see peer review as the main way in which I can currently provide a service to my academic peers. However, I have a real bone to pick with the details of how peer review is conducted in practice.

Argument

The act of publishing articles in journals other than Nature or comparable is unethical. Publication in other journals (with few exceptions) dilutes knowledge and fundamentally threatens the true institution of peer review. Unfortunately, the current traditional peer review model perpetuated by predatory publishers such as IOP, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, and Springer only serves to encourage the aforementioned knowledge dilution. Worse, these syndicates waste the time of well-meaning scientists by advocating erroneous arguments for how the traditional peer review model serves science while in reality it is simply a source of free, expert labor. In this post, I argue that modern peer review supplants this traditional model, because technologically the services of the journals is no longer required. I concede that a few journals remain viable and provide useful services, but ultimately we will need a better way to recognize academic service with respect to knowledge curation and dissemination because the traditional “currency” of the academic system–publications–is no longer a tenable solution for the next generation of up-and-coming scientists.