Our guidelines for individual posts and registering blogs are fairly robust: They allow us to take a careful look at posts and blogs to decide whether they should be allowed on ResearchBlogging.org.
But as ResearchBlogging.org becomes a higher-profile organization, it also increasingly becomes the target of pseudoscientists and crackpots advancing personal agendas that are not supported by serious research.
Because these individuals are highly motivated, they often take special care to couch their blogs in the trappings of legitimate research. Still, it doesn’t take long for a serious researcher to examine their work and see through the veneer to the real agenda behind it.
What does take a long time — what is, in the end, nearly impossible — is convincing the pseudoscientist/crackpot that her/his blog does not represent real research, and therefore isn’t acceptable.
But we don’t need to convince them — what we need to do is to convince our readers that we have real standards. From this arises the question: Should we have a new rule designed to eliminate pseudoscientists and crackpots from consideration without the benefit of extensive deliberation?
As it currently stands, if a blog is rejected due to insufficient rigor, the blogger is given the opportunity to defend him/herself publicly on this blog. We’ve done that once before, and our decision wasn’t changed. We’re currently working behind the scenes on two other such requests. Handling these requests according to our existing guidelines takes a lot of time and effort. We have to recruit experts in the relevant fields to accumulate evidence that the blogs should not be approved for our site. But we already know these blogs are unacceptable — this is essentially wasted effort.
I think we ought to give site administrators the latitude to reject obviously pseudoscientific / “crackpot” blogs simply by consulting informally among themselves and their colleagues — just as they already have the latitude to approve blogs that are obviously high quality. Only on true borderline cases should a formal review or public debate be necessary. But maybe our readers disagree — perhaps such a review is essential to the site’s mission.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments. Or make a post on your own blog, then post the link here.
