Is scientific peer review censorship?

Suzan Mazur — a critic of “Darwinism” (I think she means mod­ern biol­ogy) — recently raised a cri­tique of the sci­en­tific peer-review process, claim­ing that it serves pri­mar­ily as a means of cen­sor­ing non-conformist ideas. The con­cept has poten­tial merit — although she buries it in argu­ments like this:

Suzan Mazur: You’ve also got sci­en­tists in evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy who pound on th e cre­ation­ists because they don’t have fresh dis­cov­er­ies them­selves. What they’re doing is mak­ing an indus­try out of bash­ing the cre­ation­ists instead of improv­ing the sci­ence. That’s what’s hap­pen­ing on the sci­ence blogs, where you get these vir­tual death squads oppos­ing any sci­ence that veers from Darwin ortho­doxy. Characters pur­port­ing to be athe­ist sci­en­tists who are actu­ally vio­lent Darwin reli­gious cultists cen­sor­ing the free flow of ideas. Making state­ments like, “I’m always happy to see a fel­low hang himself.”

That’s the peer review that’s now pop­u­lar. It’s degen­er­ated into a bloody massacre.

via Suzan Mazur: Peer Review as Censorship (for a more in-depth cri­tique, see
Suzan Mazur — Perpetually Clueless).

Leaving aside her obvi­ous agenda, does peer review con­sti­tute cen­sor­ship? Technically, cen­sor­ship involves gov­ern­ment pro­scrip­tion, although can be seen to extend to sup­pres­sion by any­one with suf­fi­cient author­ity. In the United States, cen­sor­ship is typ­i­cally con­sid­ered anath­ema to a free soci­ety, but that is not true every­where (Europe pro­hibits hate speech, for exam­ple, and even in the United States cer­tain kinds of cen­sor­ship are accept­able, such as bans on child pornog­ra­phy).

Unlike pro­hi­bi­tions with the legal back­ing of gov­ern­ment author­ity, the peer review­ers act in a more ad-hoc fash­ion. They sim­ply do not oper­ate with the kind of uni­fied power char­ac­ter­is­tic of cen­sors (unless you believe that biol­ogy is con­trolled by some kind of cabal, I suppose).

That said, there is a sense in which peer review­ers — espe­cially in the sci­ences — do act in a kind of cen­so­r­ial capac­ity. They “ref­eree” arti­cles, look­ing for unwar­ranted claims, irrel­e­vant data, unsub­stan­ti­ated find­ings, or other “bad” science.

In the­ory, this review is not sup­posed to be on the accept­abil­ity or not of a cer­tain the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tive or result, but rather strictly on the basis of sci­en­tific method­ol­ogy: objec­tiv­ity, logic, ratio­nal­ity, proper con­trols, accu­rate math and sta­tis­tics, and so on.

There are no peers for new dis­cov­er­ies. To judge some­thing a peer would have to know about it. If a peer already knew about it, it would not be a new dis­cov­ery. — Larry Spring

In prac­tice, peer review cer­tainly can act as a con­ser­v­a­tive break on inno­v­a­tive or con­tro­ver­sial ideas, requir­ing addi­tional sup­port if an author seeks to rev­o­lu­tion­ize an area of sci­ence. (Personal per­spec­tives of review­ers can also play a role in reviews, of course.) The effect of this may well be that pro­po­nents of such con­tro­ver­sial ideas as “intel­li­gent design” (to pick Mazur’s area of inter­est) are expected to fol­low rig­or­ous sci­en­tific stan­dards, stan­dards which may indeed make it hard to get past review­ers (since cer­tain log­i­cal fal­lac­ies,  evi­den­tiary prob­lems, and so on often occur in such arguments).

So is peer review “cen­sor­ship”? Yes, in a decen­tral­ized and con­ser­v­a­tive man­ner, it is. But with­out it, peer reviewed jour­nals would be less trust­wor­thy, not more — we would not be able to rest our eval­u­a­tion of trust­wor­thi­ness on any­thing out­side the arti­cle itself.

This might, though, allow for more con­tro­ver­sial and rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­o­ries to emerge (inno­va­tion, any­one?) but it would increase the amount of work we, as read­ers, would have to do to eval­u­ate the trust­wor­thi­ness of sources. (This might be a good thing.) Essentially, sci­en­tific jour­nals would be indis­tin­guish­able from the Web as a whole.

What do you think? Is peer review cen­sor­ship? Is it bad cen­sor­ship? Are reforms needed and, if so, what kinds?