Guido Palazzo

Peer-review is dead. Einstein even knew it before it started: “Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.“

Today, we are confronted with a publication monster machinery, in which too many scholars write too many papers because they have to. It leads to dream profits for a few publishers, because universities have to pay a fortune to buy access to the work of their own scholars.

And what comes out of this monster machinery is rarely helping to solve urgent global problems. Most of it cannot be replicated anyway. This however, is not so problematic, because the overwhelming majority of papers never get read and cited anyway.

A broken system of knowledge production.

Nothing explains the credibility problems of neoliberal ideology of free markets and egoistic homo economicus better than the fact that the founding father of this theory, Adam Smith, lived with his mother for his entire life. She was cooking and cleaning for him while a (female) cousin took care of his accounting. The self-interested activities on the free market only worked based on a strong communitarian fundament and the caring of others. The result of all that is modern hyperindividualism and the idea that I am the master of my fate and should live and express my uniqueness (in particular through consumption). Well, it only works if someone else is cooking for you and plugging the holes in your socks.