How Could Science be Different?

In this Essay I would like to argue that if science is to keep up with the existing format of peer-review as a quality control, it is perhaps essential that peer review should be promoted as a permanent academic occupation in its own right. This in turn requires a shift in perspective on what it means to do science and what it means to be a scientist. We explore what a hypothetical universe where the peer review and academic research form a "dual track" in the scientific enterprise and discuss how it may look like. Interestingly we will be able to derive a few basic consequences of the dual track models, some of which are relevant in the realistic universe we live in. We conjecture that scientific progress may look different in such a dual-track system between research and peer review.
Erickson Tjoa
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