Does amateur science affect the peer-review process?
Right now that function is being provided mostly by the mainstream publishing industry, which is now a couple hundred years old. These publications have become academic currency. If you want to get tenure, you need the pedigree of having been published in prestigious journals. Until we can find alternative ways of crediting good work, we’re going to be stuck with the existing publishing system. The current way to have a scientific conversation is to take six months to two years to publish a paper, and the paper is the end product of research that’s taken six months, maybe many years. All of that data is stored in lab notebooks. And maybe only the best analysis of that data gets published as an auxiliary file on a publisher’s website, even though useful experimental data was generated much earlier. As we develop tools that make it easier for scientists to capture the process of actually doing research, I think that will enable a faster scientific conversation than the current six-month
