Freedom of Science

Timothy Gowers proposes a “wiki-style website” to bring closer the day when “mathematicians will cease to bother about print journals.” This will be a wiki where people will post reviews of mathematical papers.

What a noble cause!

Yet Gowers sees a major problem with such an open access publication:

To avoid the site filling up with junk one obvious ground rule is that people should not write reviews of their own papers.

This is how professional doctors see themselves: they cannot be trusted.

Furthermore,

it is not enough to stop people reviewing their own papers—they must also be stopped from editing other people’s reviews.

As evaluated by themselves professional doctors cannot be trusted to post reviews of mathematical papers on a wiki without cheating.

A commenter called Carol wants all editors of the wiki to be vetted. Again a professional will not trust another professional when it comes to publishing. Professionals will steal, cheat, lie and do whatever it is necessary to obtain an unfair advantage. All of them know this so what do they do: they try to establish industry-wide self-regulation rules.¹ 

Ulfarsson comments that “naughty mathematicians” would collude and form cabals that would publish “bad papers” and then review them favorably.²

Do we need to repeat: Professionals will cheat if not regulated.³

Why are these confessed crooked professionals entrusted with human knowledge? Doctors are supposed to be the trustees of human knowledge and as they themselves admit they are crooked professionals who cannot be trusted with little things like posting reviews on a wiki without cheating. And mathematicians are the “good doctors” who tend to their own business. Compared to mathematicians doctors of physics are exponentially more corrupt.

As an amateur it would be silly for me to cheat on my research. I do research because I love it. It makes no sense to cheat. On the other hand cheating is a way of life for professionals. Their allegiance is to their career not to science.

1. And sell those self-regulation rules as rules of doing science. [↩]
2. He is basically describing the peer review system. [↩]
3. They will cheat both their colleagues and their constituency. [↩]

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