There’s an interesting post from the political blog The Monkey Cage, which describes a recent scandal with an open access academic journal. Here’s the key part of the story:

Using pseudonyms, Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, claiming to be researchers at the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology (in case you don’t recall what phrenology is, it’s the study of personality through analysis of bumps on the head — and check out the initials of the ostensible center), submitted a paper to The Open Information Science Journal . Note that I didn’t say that Davis and Anderson wrote the article. In fact, the article was written by a computer program, which cobbled together words and phrases that Davis and Anderson provided to form complex, and often bizarre, sentences. The results reported in the paper were phonies, too.

What happened? Davis and Anderson were contacted by the publisher and informed that their paper had withstood its peer review process and was therefore eligible for publication, pending receipt of $800 in fees.

This obviously says a few things about peer review, and the open access publishing system. The angle that interests me is what this says about getting ideas to spread. One of the problems that we always have is that people often have difficulties in judging quality, so they use proxies. One of the proxies that we use in academia is peer review – if an article has passed peer review, we then assume that it is of at least a minimal level of quality.

But really, this is just laziness. We often mistake the proxies we use (peer review as a reflection of quality) for the things they are actually supposed to measure (quality). I think we’d be better off if we got better at judging quality for ourselves. It takes more work, but the payoffs are substantial. And if we’re trying to get our own ideas to spread, we need to be aware that it’s not enough to just come up with something that’s better than what is already out there – we have to get the idea to spread. And this is true for a new academic model, a new product or service, or a new way of doing things. To do that, we need to understand the proxies that people use to substitute for judging quality.

(the image shows ideas spreading on twitter – it comes from this blog…)

I generally hate blog posts about blogging, so I guess I’ll hate this one. Mainly, I just want to share this terrific article from American Scientist. The main point of the article is that researchers learn their craft better by writing about it, specifically, by explaining their work to people that don’t work in their field. One of my old managers was almost entirely full of crap, but one thing that he repeatedly said was that if you can’t explain your work to someone that doesn’t know anything about it, then you don’t understand it yourself. There are a couple of fields that might be exceptions to this, but in the main I think this is true. So I think that’s one good reason for academics (or anyone!) to write a blog – it makes you better at communicating your ideas, and it makes it easier for these ideas to spread.

The second good reason is that writing is thinking. A lot of the time we don’t really know what we think about an idea until we write it out. Blogging is a great way to do this. Lilia Efimova has just finished a PhD looking at this, and her conclusion is that blogs are useful as ‘personal thinking space’. In my personal experience, this is very true, and another good reason to write more consistently, for either a general audience or for your peers. I’ve tried out a lot of ideas here first that I’ve ended up using as examples in lectures, and also a couple that will end up in papers at some point.

The last good reason to write all the time (and accessably) is that it helps avoid the syndrome where academics show ‘a fondness for collecting a salary and getting away with as little intellectual intercourse as possible‘. It’s a great way to engage, and I think we should all be looking for more of these.

So what are you waiting for? Start a blog now!