Peer Review - quo vadis?

Peer review, a practice for ensuring quality in science – each discipline has its own process, its own style with weaknesses and strengths. This evening offers perspectives from a variety of disciplines that collaborate in increasingly interdisciplinary research fields. What does peer review look like in other disciplines? Can peer review do justice to our increasingly interdependent scientific world? 

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.

Berlin Exchange (BE) is a network of student journals, founded in Berlin by Berlin Exchange Medicine (life sciences), anwesenheitsnotiz  (humanities) and PolisReflects (International Relations). The project is advised by the Berlin University Alliance (Objective 2 "Fostering Knowledge Exchange"). In our work, we strive for an interdisciplinary and innovative approach to open access publishing, engaging students in research early in their careers and providing them with the platform and resources they need to become critical participants in the field of scientific publishing. We strongly believe that students hold great potential to proactively shape future science with innovative ideas. 

Peer review is THE established practice to ensure scientific standards. Scientists from the same discipline are considered peers, and they assess each other's write-ups of research results before these are published. But this process has its pitfalls, which are increasingly being discussed in a variety of contexts. After a fragmentation of science into numerous disciplines and sub-disciplines within the last three hundred years, our world is now more interconnected than ever - visible in countless interdisciplinary research areas currently emerging.