Robert Maxwell’s dark legacy of peer review: time to stop a system that tramples on intellectual freedoms?

Goldhedge · Jul 5, 2024

the gilt coming off the proverbial 'peer review' lily??

Robert Maxwell’s dark legacy of peer review: time to stop a system that tramples on intellectual freedoms?

By Prof. Gloria Moss Ph.D. FCIPD
May 16, 2024

Whether you are in Italy, France, Britain, Scandinavia, Russia or the US, if you want to contribute to the knowledge base of society and work in Higher Education – a university for example – then you will need to publish in peer-reviewed journals, and the more highly ranked these are, the better. Unfortunately, you may be surprised to find how narrow they are but they will get you a job the world’s top universities.

This is not just hearsay but a snapshot of the views of eminent academics. Professor Alvesson, for example, of the University of Lund, Sweden and University of Queensland refers to ‘a proliferation of meaningless research of no value to society’. He even goes so far as to speak of ‘nonsense’ in academic research ….the creation of a vacuum of meaning’, concluding that since ‘never before in history of humanity have so many written so much while having so little to say to so few’, it’s become a question of ‘publish as we perish’. As if this is not bad enough, a fellow academic has written of the production of ‘a great stream of publications that are both uninteresting and unread’ (Muller, 2018).

The implications are stark. Truth and intellectual honesty can be a casualty and it is easy to imagine the effects on applied subjects such as medicine, engineering, physics and meteorology as well as on the humanities for example history, culture and literature. The health and vibrancy of our world has been suffocated by this peer-reviewed system.

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