An end to ‘God-like’ scientific knowledge? How non-anonymous referees and open review alter meanings for scientific knowledge

In this paper I reflect on changing journal peer review practices and relations, and more particularly, on anonymity for referees and openness of review practices and relations. I explore how non-anonymity for referees and open access to journal peer review editorial judgements and decisions contribute to reshaping meanings for scientific knowledge. Anonymous referees and closed access to editorial documents had, until now, helped shape a meaning of objective and ‘God-like’ absolute knowledge. In contrast, more recent non-anonymous referee and open access dynamics have contributed to a new meaning of situated and partial scientific knowledge. I draw from scholarship on peer review, in legal studies, in the sociology of secrecy, and in the sociology of knowledge. I conclude that non-anonymous referees and open review practices and relations challenge ‘God-like’ scientific knowledge in secretive pre-publication journal peer review that, until now, has been instrumental for natural scientific and medical journal publication models that mostly sell scientific knowledge as news. AUTHOR’S NOTE: This sociological preprint is one of a series in which I explore ignorance (re)production in journal peer review and journal peer review dynamics more generally. The main target audience is natural science researchers, publishers, and policymakers and a secondary audience is social scientists with an interest in journal peer review in the natural sciences. © 2014 The author (Joanne Gaudet). For any use, the original work must be properly cited: Gaudet, J. 2014. An end to ‘God-like’ scientific knowledge? How non-anonymous referees and open review alter meanings for scientific knowledge. uO Research. Pp. 1-12. [Peer review is] a game. [...] [Making anonymous or non-anonymous referee judgements and editor’s judgements openly available to the scientific community] would be innovative, I think. And this would also kind of reveal the subjectiveness of peer review. With the 60 papers I’ve published so far, I have never had a paper where the two reviewers were absolutely consistent about what they complained about. Anonymous Natural Scientist, 2013 Introduction The main goal in this paper is to explore how journal peer review practices and relations for referee anonymity and access to editorial document shape meanings for scientific knowledge. To reach my goal, I draw from research on journal peer review (i.e., Biagioli, 2002; Gaudet, 2014a; Gaudet, 2014b), and from scholarship in legal 1 Although I only refer to ‘scientific knowledge’, conceptually I include ‘scientific ignorance’ (Gaudet, 2013). I understand ignorance in science as the limits and the borders of knowing (Gross, 2010).