WordPress for the bigger work

People like to share links and photos and short messages.  But everyone, or at least a large number of persons, also wants to write a novel.  WordPress can be a great platform for that bigger work.

Novels aren’t read from finish to start.  They aren’t written from start to finish, either.  Bigger works consist of smaller pieces — chapters, sections, asides, photo collages, video snippets — not necessarily created in a particular order.  These pieces are sifted, ordered, and stitched together to make the bigger work. Adding such capabilities into the core of future versions of WordPress would help to inspire WordPress users to create bigger works.

WordPress plugins already exist to make bigger works from posts. For example, using postMash (filtered) you could create a category as a bigger work.  All posts placed in a cataegory can be ordered through a drag-and-drop interface.  Easy Post Order provides an alternative, short-code-based means to define an order among selected posts.  Such plugins are useful tools. But they don’t provide as much inspiration as a feature in the WordPress core.

The WordPress core could easily support basic features for creating bigger works from posts.  Using the order-by field used for pages but apparently fallow for posts, the WordPress core could be extended smoothly to allow a custom order for any tag or category.  That would be a useful feature pointing WordPress users toward bigger works.

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social reality of scholarly peer review

Peer-reviewed publications are currently the main currency for academic advancement.  Like fiat currencies  in general economic use, the value of editorial peer review appears to be largely in its value for economic transactions.  Consider, for example, a scholarly study published in 1982.  The authors created fictitious authors for twelve articles published in twelve highly regarded psychology journals eighteen to thirty-two months earlier.  These articles were then resubmitted for publication to the same journals that had published them previously.  The outcome:

Of the sample of thirty-eight editors and reviewers, only three (8 percent) detected the resubmissions.  This result allowed nine of the twelve articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected.  Sixteen of the eighteen referees (89 percent) recommended against publication and the editors concurred.  The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.”[1]

A critical article on peer review recently noted:

At the British Medical Journal we took a 600 word study that we were about to publish and inserted eight errors.  We then sent the paper to about 300 reviewers.  The median number of errors spotted was two, and 20% of the reviewers did not spot any.  We did further studies of deliberately inserting errors, some very major, and came up with similar results.[2]

Methodological and statistical analysis of published empirical research has concluded that most published research findings are false.[3]  Another review of empirical evidence on peer review concluded:

At present, little empirical evidence is available to support the use of editorial peer review as a mechanism to ensure quality of biomedical research. However, the methodological problems in studying peer review are many and complex. At present, the absence of evidence on efficacy and effectiveness cannot be interpreted as evidence of their absence.[4]

Surely a central aspect of the methodological problems is that peer-reviewed articles are the primary scholarly assets of scholars today.  If persons were to recognize that editorial peer review has no fundamental value, the scholarly economy might collapse.

In the communicative circumstances of the Internet, publish everything is a good fundamental principle. Classical peer review tends to be understood as a value-creating quality filter for publication.  It is associated with competition to get as many peer-reviewed publications as possible.  An alternative to peer review is open-access competition for attention and approval: “publish everything and then let the world decide what is important.”[5]  The Internet allows a huge amount of information to be made available to a huge number of persons at much lower cost than would be possible with print publications.  That technological transformation fundamentally favors making any symbolic work available to everyone.

However, making any symbolic work available to everyone is not sufficient for a secure, well-functioning scholarly economy.  The effect of social influence on symbolic choices isn’t well understood.  Yet one can reasonably believe that fashions and celebrities are not manifestations of a good process for seeking truth, although they may be an inevitable aspect of any real social process.  “Let the world decide what is important” ignores the reality and importance of human social nature and human institutions.  A good social structures for symbolic competition in truth-seeking is a key challenge for the new Internet world.

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Update: more on reforming peer review

Notes:

[1] Douglas P. Peters and Stephen J. Ceci (1982). Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5, pp 187-195 doi:10.1017/S0140525X00011183

[2] Richard Smith (2010). Classical peer review: an empty gun. Breast Cancer Research, 12(Suppl 4):S13 doi:10.1186/bcr2742

[3] John P. A. Ioannidis (2005).  Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.  PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

[4] Jefferson T, Rudin M, Brodney Folse S, Davidoff F.  Editorial peer review for improving the quality of reports of biomedical studies. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2007, Issue 2. Art. No.: MR000016. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.MR000016.pub3

[5] Smith (2010), cited above, p. 3.

institutional ownership reduces First Folio liquidity

From 1893 to 1928, Henry Folger bought 82 copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio.  Why would anyone want 82 copies of a rare and very expensive book of widely published plays?

If Henry Folger’s heirs had received his First Folio collection, they probably would have had a big-ticket estate sale.  But Folger didn’t leave his 82 First Folios to his individual heirs.  Folger established the Folger Shakespeare Library with his First Folio collection as its centerpiece.  Unlike Henry Folger, the Folger Shakespeare Library can exist forever.  As long as it exists, the Folger Shakespeare Library is highly unlikely to sell any of its First Folios.

When Shakespeare’s First Folio became a collector’s item in the eighteenth century, individuals owned most of them.  Since then, First Folio ownership has shifted from individuals to institutions.  Institutions now own all but about 20 of the 232 existing copies of the First Folio.

Buying 82 copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio is now inconceivable at any price.  That’s an institutional effect that makes Henry Folger seem economically sane.

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The First Folio counts cited above are from the exhibition, Fame, Fortune, & Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio, at the Folger Shakespeare Library, June 3 to Sept. 3, 2011.