Blogging & Peer Review

Dorothy Bishop who is a colleague in the Department of Experimental Psychology here at Oxford has a nice post on her blog: Blogging as post-publication peer review: reasonable or unfair. She is surely right. The truth of a scientific claim, argument  or criticism  does not depend on how it is brought into the public domain, but on its cogency. All attempts to silence critics by appeals to the sacrosanct nature of peer review publications, relative journal impact factors and so forth seem to me to be, at best, so much persiflage, and in effect the very antithesis of what science should be about. In fact they seem to me to be the arguments of people who only care about the external trappings of science rather than the activity itself. If you are right, you are right and if you are not then somebody will find it out and when they put their evidence in the public domain we'll all be better off. Some bloke called Popper said all this much more eloquently a long time ago. Publish and be damned!