nancy sutton wrote:
There is so much that is worse than 'fishy' about what is being done to our societies .... and the average citizen does not have time to do the research, and SHOULDN"T HAVE TO, if TPTB are trustworthy. It is certainly more comfortable to just 'go along', but things are getting waaaaay to crazy to continue floating, IMO.
I'll admit in a fairly half-cocked way that my go-to paradigm for the best society humans can deliver is a small tribe.....but that's just me from some reading. :-)
Nevertheless, it does seem that "the powers that be" are more front and center in that model and *hopefully* have the best interests of the tribe in mind.
Unfortunately, in what we have today, it is quite difficult to see a clear path forward in this regard. Although accidental and deliberate misconduct in past scientific inquiry certainly occurred, the presence of scientific societies at least helped to 'right the ship' within their respective professional societies....which often were the organs that published the journals as well. The downside was the the societies could become rather 'exclusive'....and quite probably a lot of good research never saw the light of day if for one reason or another a non-society member's submission fell into less-than-welcoming hands. So backlash occurred and one end result is the *explosion" of open-access and non-society-tethered journals. It's not that they are all 'bad' and certainly good papers get published in them. But in the interest of pushing papers out the door, many of these journals,....on average....can have rather shoddy review processes. And yet ALL of them that are structured in the manner of the old society journals will, with few exceptions, lay claim to being a "peer-reviewed journal". It's still too early to tell what the overall effect on scientific rigor and public trust will come from this trend, but it may mark a less than beneficial outcome at the end of the day. Hard to say at this point.....
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-Art Donnelly
