What is so special about the Oxenhielm case?
It is not the fallacy of the peer review system. I have a suspicion that the time a reviewer spends reviewing a submitted paper has been going downhill the last couple of decades. My only concrete “evidence” for this is that sometimes you hear scientists complain about the lack of adequate time for peer review (and the question would of course need to be studied in more detail). The number of papers and journals has been increasing. Even if 99.999 % of all papers are “correct”, the vast amount of science published today (remember, 90 percent of all scientists that ever lived are still alive) means that there are a number of faulty papers every now and then that slip through the peer review system. (And then there are the papers that aren’t outright wrong, but somewhere in the grey area, on the spectrum between pathological science and good, solid methodology.) Another suspicion I have - though I can’t back it up, it’s just a guess - is that the peer review system is not at all as fool-proof as some people seem to think. Jan Hendrik Schön kept publishing papers, many in the most prestigious of high-impact journals, for quite some time before someone became suspicious and decided to check out what was going on.
Is it the fact that it is mathematics? We could invoke good old Comte and say that maths was the first science to reach high levels of reliability. Either you convince your colleagues about the deductions or you don’t (and then it won’t be published), whereas in empirical sciences you could do all kinds of massaging of datapoints, selection of measurements &c; your peers will have to trust you on that. Therefore, a fault in peer review in maths would become all the more visible and people get all worked up.
Is it the fact that Elin Oxenhielm is young and will not be portraied by Russell Crowe when the movie is made? That could account for much of the media interest. Media is always interested in putting the “human factor” in their storytelling about academic life.
But let’s leave the media aside for a moment and instead look at two comment threads on the blog unstruct.org; here and here. There are a number of people discussing the affair there and several seem to me to be knowledgeable in the field of maths, some are really advanced: Grigori Rozenblium, professor of mathematics at Chalmers technical university is one of the writers there, another one is a PhD &c. It is, thus, not the letters column of your average daily newspaper. Topics include womens’ role in the academic system, proofs in mathematics, the peer review system &c.
These winding threads contain, among other things, comments that used to be buried in other media: letters to colleagues, e-mail, gossip over beer at conferences, discussions in workshops &c. But where do the threads at unstruct.org fit in?
Now, I suspect that you could have at least two quite distinct paths taken in the development. You could have the peer review the peer reviewers scenario. Here, scientists decide to use the force of the Net, social software such as blogs, preprint archives and what have you, to make a more or less open discussion about the quality of papers, published or un-published. You would still have peer review, but since that is obviously not always to be trusted, you would have a semi-public discussion (yes, semi-public instead of public, not because it would be locked away behind passwords but rather because ordinary citizens would not be able to understand a word) about papers and other results. The Net result would be better science through public scrutiny and an opening up of scientific practice, just like when the guys at Royal Society decided to do things in the open some 360 years ago. It would not be a world without peer review. It would be a world with a better peer review.
Or you could have the don’t rock the boat scenario. Anything that would take place outside of the classical arenas - peer review, publication, conferences, &c - would be deemed bad science. Some of the old school players among the publishing corporations could perhaps be interested in such a path.
