Making referee reports more transparent

From the very interesting new blog,   New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science: 

Here’s a simple proposal (due to Alva Noe, as far as I can tell): accepted, refereed papers and books should be accompanied with the name of the referees and, ideally, their reports, if only, in the online edition. (Note rejections can still be done anonymously.)

The author, Eric Schliesser, sees a number of benefits, including the improvement in referee diligence and the transparency of connections between editors, ingroups, etc.

Read the full post here.

Import of the Browne recommendations

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities). The single most radical recommendation in the report, by quite a long way, is the almost complete withdrawal of the present annual block grant that government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching, currently around £3.9 billion. This is more than simply a ‘cut’, even a draconian one: it signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it.

For more, go here.