The Nature Peepers

Abstract

Lewis focuses on expertise and authority in science. This discussion explores several key questions about scientific process, including how science identifies important research questions, assesses the utility of research and evaluates scientific expertise. Using experiences of peer review and recent controversies in the scientific community, such as the hiatus in global temperatures, Lewis examines the evaluation of scientific knowledge and the place of commercial publishing in research. Lewis problematises the distinction between the scientific expert and non-expert, and recommends several practical and conceptual step towards making science and its processes more accessible. These include embracing open access publishing and two-stage peer review, and recognising knowledge produced from citizen scientists.

Glossary

Academy

 The academy is the institution and community concerned with the pursuit of research and scholarship.

Authority

 Here I refer to science as an authority, having societal influence through our knowledge claims.

Citizen scientist

 These are volunteers who work in collaboration with scientists to expand scientific data collection and analysis.

Contract

 A concept of Hulme’s (2009) to describe the critical relationship between science and society, which is bound by a contract of understanding and obligation.

Expertise

 Credibility and knowledge in a particular area obtained by study, training or formal experience.

Governance

 This refers to the way in which is the way the rules, norms and actions are structured and imposed within a group or organisation, including informally through outside influences.

Hiatus

 The slowdown in the rate of global surface warming over the period of approximately 1997–2015.

Murmuration

 A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, a mass of birds that appear to be connected together in flight.

Nature peepers

 An alternative term to ‘scientist’ described by the Quarterly Review (1834). Here, I use this term to describe science that has not been formalised and is, at least to some degree, intuitive and accessible.

Peer review

 The disinterested process by which the merit of a scientific contribution is assessed within the community based on accuracy, systematic important and intrinsic interest of its subject matter.

Republic

 This is Polanyi’s (1962) description of science, comprised of a ‘community of scientists [is] organised in a way which resembles certain features of a body politic and works according to economic principles similar to those by which the production of material goods is regulated’ (p. 54).

Tribe

 Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) description of scientists as bound together by a set of practices. This is summarised by Law (2004) as ‘Scientists have a culture. They have beliefs. They have practices. They work, they gossip, and they worry about the future. And, somehow or other, out of their work, their practices and their beliefs, they produce knowledge, scientific knowledge, accounts of reality’ (p. 19).