Groups of topical experts can form into committees responsible for evaluating work being done within their field of focus.
Membership in a committee is by the consent of the existing members. It doesn't mean that everybody has to agree, and no one has to surrender their individual opinions and prerogatives to the decisions of the committee. Members do not have to collaborate on research projects. The only goal of the committee is simply to develop and maintain an online review of the work being done within their fields of focus.
The first benefit is to the larger community, wherein people wishing to venture into a new territory will find it advantageous to read an objective review done by people who are active in that field. Review papers in prestigious journals are extremely useful, but tend to lag 5 years behind, and are generally only done in situations where there are acknowledged experts. We want to see reviews of current, ongoing research, by people specializing in those topics, whether they are renowned outside of their specialties or not.
The next two benefits are to the committee members themselves.
First, with just a little bit of encouragement, independent investigators will share their bibliographies. Past that point, instead of all members having to do independent searches for relevant literature, to keep up with new publications, they can coordinate their efforts, and achieve a more complete coverage of the literature, with less effort. Whenever a member finds a relevant paper, he/she adds it into the relevant section of the combined bibliography, perhaps with a note saying how it relates to the committee's field of focus (which might not be obvious just in reading the article's abstract).
Second, once a committee gets organized, and its review of the literature gets acknowledged as a good resource, the members will no longer have to spend a lot of time looking for relevant literature. Rather, people doing original research will petition them for mention in the review. Analogously, editors of established scientific journals do not have to search for people who might be writing papers suitable for those journals. Rather, the scientists subscribe to the journals that are relevant for them, and submit their material to those same journals. The same process can work for cutting edge material. People will begin their projects by reading the online reviews within their specialties, and will naturally submit their works to the same people when they're done. At this point, the committee has become the central clearing-house for information within that field, and the members just have to sort out the requests for mention in their reviews.
And lastly, the benefit to independent investigators is that they will have a place to post their works where they will be found. Just posting a PDF to the Internet doesn't mean that it will actually be read by anybody, especially in extremely esoteric topics. There might be a dozen people in the world who are capable of understanding it. But how are they ever going to find it, considering the large number of sites that host new works? If we have a central location where new works are being peer-reviewed, people will be able to find relevant works.
Note that this basic strategy was heavily inspired by the ideas of "sociocracy" (i.e., group rule). Sociocracy is a concept that has been around for a while, though in recent years it has reached a new level of sophistication, greatly increasing its applicability to real world problems, and sparking a new surge in interest. It literally means rule by the group. The idea recognizably originated with Auguste Comte (1798~1857), who proposed that committees of experts should make decisions, not hereditary monarchs or the unruly masses, both of which can be fickle. Sociocracy attempts to impose just enough structure to avoid the pitfalls of democracy (i.e., too many different opinions, swayed by crowd dynamics instead of legitimate reasoning), without autocratically suppressing the creativity of each individual.
The new conception of sociocracy takes into account the non-linear nature of human endeavors, wherein all things affect all other things. So group decision making needs to be informed by prior experiences; it needs to anticipate the acquisition of new knowledge and its accompanying opportunities; and it needs to dovetail with concurrent decisions in related endeavors. Modern sociocracy also takes into account the hierarchical nature of real life, where high- and low-level decisions need to be approached in different ways, and where there is non-linear feedback between each level. Hence sociocracy is beginning to reflect the actual complexity of practical decision making, and provides the organizational structure to keep initiatives on track, while optimizing all of the talents of the stakeholders.
The
moderators believe that these ideas can, and should, be applied to scientific inquiry.
Typically, research is centrally controlled, with academic institutions and government agencies arranging all of the resource allocation, and with individuals then volunteering for the assignments. The control structure tends to be conservative. We can all understand that those responsible for public funds have to act responsibly, and allocating resources for some of the wild ideas that go through the minds of scientists can raise eyebrows. Yet major scientific advances always start as wild ideas in the minds of crazy scientists. As a consequence, such advances typically occur by the unpaid labors of individuals working in solitude, frequently duplicating the efforts of other people, and rarely getting the benefit of constructive criticisms. Thus massive amounts of effort are poured into extremely inefficient inquiries. Meanwhile, less and less progress is being made by funded initiatives, for want of fresh ideas. We need a more flexible organization, with the control closer to the actual expertise, but we need to retain enough structure that it doesn't become a nonsensical free-for-all.
For more info on sociocracy in general, see:
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