Open Peer Review 2.0

Image: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Mike Brown, a famous astronomer (partially because he was instrumental in Pluto acquiring ‘Dwarf’ planetary status 3 years ago), has found fog on Titan with his students Alex Smith and Clare Chen.

This is a very cool discovery (cool enough to make fog) and he has submitted a paper describing the findings for publication in a scientific journal. In his blog entry, he also talk about one of the biggest limitations of the peer reviewing system: usually one or two scientists read the paper and decide whether it is worthy of publication or not.

So he invites whoever is willing to review his paper to submit comments for improvements.

The novelty lies in his commitment to take into account the feedback that improves the paper. If Nature has tried Open Peer Review before, this is rather different because it’s controlled by the author, not by the journal.

If this works, there is a fair chance that the journal will receive an edited version with more and different modifications than suggested by their “in-house” (= outsourced to their group of reviewers) referees. How will the editor and referee(s) react to that?

I find it bold to do on such a significant paper, not one that will go unnoticed. Very cool.

In fact, if this system grows to become institutionalised and an increasing number of scientific papers get reviewed openly like that, presumably the number of volunteer reviewers for each paper itself will be interesting to monitor. It would reflect a complicated chemistry of importance of discovery, popularity of topics and authors, etc.

Moreover, if crowdsourcing theory holds and if the crowd is big enough, factors like misunderstandings, individual bias, conflict of interest, etc. are likely to cancel each other out. Certainly a positive evolution.

I see another great potential in this system. Imagine what you could learn as a student – and what talent you could discover as professor, if you involved your students in reviewing papers? It is a useful skill to learn and the number of brains that could contribute ideas is multiplied. As this is ‘real’, it might be a motivation for students who get glued in their speciality to learn what is going on in other fields?

OK I’ll stop my speculations here. All the information is available on his blog ‘Mike Brown’s Planets‘ and in true Web2.0 fashion, the first appeal to Open Peer Review appeared in RSS feeds and twitter (see @plutokiller)

:)

IAU tidbits (1)

Concrete recommendations to develop astronomy in an emerging country. Fellowships and lots of outreach.

Bottom-line: invest in people

Source: I. Ramírez, The impact of IAU educational programs on Peruvian astronomy, SpS4

The IAU internet access in a screenshot

Malkov: Survey (opinion poll) in Russia about the future of astronomy

3 groups of people were asked to rate predictions on astronomical discoveries:
Science Journalists, Professional Astronomers, and Amateur Astronomers.

Here are some snippets of people’s predictions

Unlikely: discovery of a new planet in our solar system

Next few years (likelihood in brackets): astronomy on the curriculum 81%, samples of soil returned to earth from mars 100%

Late 2020s: nature of gamma Ray bursts understood

2030s: detected gravitational waves, regular commercial space flight, nature of dark matter unraveled

Late 2040s: Permanent observatory on the moon, Dark energy understood

2060s: space tourism industry, Saturn atmosphere sample collected and brought back to Earth, use of extraterrestrial raw materials

End of XXIst century: 50% solar energy, public transportation Earth-Moon

2170: contact with extraterrestrial life forms :)

The difficulty of each question evaluated by the number of experts replying ‘i don’t know’

Amateurs’ predictions are more pessimistic than experts’ predictions

According to amateurs a Tunguska event will happen before we have an Earth collision protection system. Oops :)

Malkov’s final comment: this is very subjective but it is the best we can propose today…

Kissler-Patig on huge optical telescopes of the future: JWST, GMT, TMT, E-ELT

Note to self: I must read Martin Harwit’s work on astronomical discoveries

When you are looking for something you either look elsewhere or you look harder. Extremely large telescopes are of the look harder kind.

Most exciting prospects of the ELTs?
- Study of exoplanets
- Tests of fundamental physics (varying fundamental constants?)

Limitations:
- Price tag (approaching the order of magnitude of space missions)
- Availability (less observing time)
- Versatility (fewer instruments on each instrument)

Open question: should time be given as small chunks of time?

Small projects allow more diversity, risk, opportunity… Big projects needed to address big questions. How to balance the two?

About observing time allocation: there could be annual deadlines for big projects & continuous open observing proposals for small projects? (like HST)

Another tradeoff: multipurpose vs specialised instruments

The price tag is an additional factors in balancing the various tradeoffs. Therefore we need to rethink our operating modes.

Personal comment: It looks like big telescope management needs a Think different approach :)

He had a cool slide putting the E-ELT in front of the great pyramids in Egypt. His comment was to show that we have built bigger things with lower technology before :)