The organization and application of science policies in the US dictated how science conducted and how scientist would approach science. The measure of successful and sometimes valuable/profitable science is the practice of peer review with procedural changes. The three regimes in policies can be restated as follows: the first term with the driving force of industry, the second term with the driving force of military, and the third term with the driving force of market. Therefore, peer review process should be analyzed under different sources of motivation in the contemporary history.
In the period after WW1, researchers in the US obtained their financial supports through corporations where the allocated grants were processed as in business protocols. Their scientific outputs found themselves places as in progress reports. This type of bureaucratic peer evaluation was exerted as an instrument of business contracts (Mirowski, 2004, p.291). The private science journals and their editors were judging the submitted reports/papers to make sure they were in line with the scientific method that is defined as the method of thinking by Dewey (Biagioli, 2020, p.4).
With the changing dynamics during the Cold War, military guided the scientific projects having contracts with universities and moving scientists in an ivory tower where they will be protected from non-experts after the Bomb (Mirowski, 2004, p.306). The military science managers benefited researchers to get away with their academic duties in universities and granted a kind of peer approval through disciplinary feedback (Mirowski, 2004, p.306). Journals were privatized and limited, so that the state subsidized fees for page count or libraries. The increasing number of scientific branches around that time required more specialized experts for the evaluation of submitted papers. To satisfy the need of experts, journals reached out more people outside the journal cycle and asked their help in peer review process (Spier, 2002, p.358). The supporting agencies shifted towards corporations and NGOs after 1980s emphasizing the declining power of the US military in policies that fell short in promoting interdisciplinary short-term projects. The flexible international collaborations were more desired to satisfy emerging needs quickly in the global market.
The third regime is under the oath of neoliberal policies that bring multiple policy proposals at different times to illegitimate political interventions. The main strategy in this era is to generate doubtful situations by emphasizing scientific uncertainty and discrediting unfriendly scientists by claiming their work as junk science. The identification and demarcation of bad science were not very obvious although some, categorized as Diggers, suggested and promoted the peer review process as a solution. Oreskes and Conway stated that “We rightly demand that a prosecutor provide evidence – abundant, good, solid, consistent evidence – and that the evidence stands up to the scrutiny of a jury of peers, who can take as much time as they need. Science is pretty much the same.” (Oreskes and Conway, 2010, p.32). The peer review process has become the standard of paper evaluations while papers and scientists are attached to their success scores, which are identified by citation and journal metrics. The ranking of journals, articles, and researchers put all the actors in a market-like structure where peers are distributing credits to their colleagues. The notion of marketplace for ideas is presenting science as a profit-making practice. The commercialization of science is now stipulating open science for the next step. In this open new world, the role of expertise, and consequently, peer reviews are exposed to hard fights beseeching for inviting citizen scientists for the evaluation of scientific knowledge. The main motive in this period becomes taking control of access to knowledge.
Science publications have been formed around a prime mover in three periods of the US. Since the orchestrator has been evolved in time being industry, military, and market, the instrumentals approving good science have transformed from businesspersons, officers, to reviewers. Scientific developments as a marker of being a strong actor in global economy under the neoliberal climate have been validated with the peer-reviewed, in other words, the approved science assuring the quality of publications. However, scientists’ role as experts might change very soon.
References
Biagioli, Mario, and Alexandra Lippman, eds. (2020). Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research. The MIT Press.
Mirowski, P. (2020) .HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Agnotology, University of Notre Dame.
Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Post-truth in STS Part-2, University of Notre Dame.
Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Science policy in America, University of Notre Dame.
Mirowski, P. (2004). The scientific dimensions of social knowledge and their distant echoes in 20th-century American philosophy of science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 35(2), 283–326. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2003.11.002
Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2011). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Spier, R. (2002). The history of the peer-review process. Trends in Biotechnology, 20(8), 357–358. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-7799(02)01985-6