Dr. Lara Urban (PhD), an independent Research Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand, with a background in statistical and conservation genomics, and member of the Early Career Advisory Group and the preprint working group at eLife.
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Dirnagl, Director of the Department of Experimental Neurology and Founding Director of the QUEST Center for Responsible Research at Berlin Institute of Health, a critic of peer review.
Prof. Dr. Michael Haefner, Director of the Institute for Theory and Practice of Communication, Professor for Social and Communication Psychology, recently focusing on psychology of political extremism.
Dr. Michael Friedman is a Mathematician, Historian of Mathematics and scholar of Philosophy. The focus of his research is on how material, visual and symbolic knowledge interact with each other.
Peer review is the established practice to ensure scientific standards.
Scientists from the same discipline are considered to be peers; they assess each other’s research results and research projects before they are published or implemented. But this process has its pitfalls, which are increasingly being discussed in a variety of contexts.
After the fragmentation of science into numerous disciplines and sub-disciplines over the last two to three hundred years, our world is now more interconnected than ever – which is visible in the countless interdisciplinary research fields that are currently emerging. But what does peer review look like in such an interdisciplinary world? How do we create a discourse of science in which disciplines can understand each other, exchange ideas and develop common research styles despite their respective jargons?
At this event, we discuss know how peer review is handled in the different scientific disciplines and to what extent interdisciplinary review procedures are also conceivable and desirable.
- Where are the main differences and where are the strengths and weaknesses of the established peer review procedures? What innovative approaches are there?
- When is the extradisciplinary view also illuminating and enriching? When is it disturbing and confusing?
- How elastic is the term ‘peer’? Does peer review need to be revolutionised to accommodate an interdisciplinary future, or could interdisciplinary review processes be subsumed under an additional, new term?
Berlin Exchange is a student journal network founded by the journals anwesenheitsnotiz, Berlin Exchange Medicine and PolisReflects. Together, we aim to make Open Access publishing interdisciplinary, student-centred and innovative, to encourage students to engage with research at an early age, and to provide them with the platform and resources they need to become critical actors in the scientific process.