Thursday, November 15, 2012

Open Evaluation and the Scientific Order

Can science be made into an even more spontaneous order? Perhaps, with open evaluation. With the internet, there is no reason why scientific publications cannot both be open access and have open evaluation.

Online journals are very low-cost to maintain -- so low-cost that a few donations would cover it, if the editor didn't want to pony up the $10/yr or so needed to keep it going after the initial cost of setting the journal up. And imagine what it will do to science to have experts in a variety of fields commenting on a paper. More complex processes will be better understood, because more complex processes really require a more interdisciplinary approach than has been required for the simpler sciences, such as the simple physical and chemical processes we have mostly focused on since Newton.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that the spontaneous order of the internet is allowing the spontaneous order of science to become more complex, which in turn will allow scientists to better study more complex phenomena.

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