Timeline for Why do non-governmental organizations tend to publish non peer-reviewed "grey" literature?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
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| Sep 28, 2018 at 21:34 | comment | added | tonysdg | @OganM: That's an incredibly field-specific process -- some areas of mathematics average 24 months: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/32768/… | |
| Sep 28, 2018 at 20:45 | comment | added | OganM | Peer review is not that slow. If your methods are sound enough to pass peer review, you'll probably get accepted within the month, if not, you shouldn't be out there making claims that may effect policy anyway. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 18:10 | comment | added | JeffE | @HermanToothrot Given the current rampant anti-intellectualism in the US federal government, I strongly suspect a peer-reviewed publication in Science would make the results significantly less politically credible. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 17:44 | comment | added | silvado | And usually they don't want to transfer copyright to a journal, nor pay an open access publishing fee. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 15:01 | comment | added | xLeitix | @HermanToothrot Given that they will literally never read the academic paper I would say the report written by the intern (which also happens to get dressed up pretty by the marketing department, put prominently on the Website, and distributed through press releases). Sure, you could do the same things to an academic paper, but what does it help you to jump through the academic reviewing hoop if your target audience doesn't care? | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 14:32 | comment | added | RemcoGerlich | Also peer reviewed journals are very expensive to read. University libraries usually pay for access because that's the system they live in, but NGOs typically won't. And who wants to publish in a journal they can't read? | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 13:05 | comment | added | Buffy | @HermanToothrot, I wasn't trying to cover every case, of course. Just a possible alternative answer to the one given here. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 13:01 | comment | added | Herman Toothrot | @xLeitix Why would it not help them? Do you think governments or local politicians would be more pressed against a paper published in Science or a report written by an intern? | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 12:59 | comment | added | Herman Toothrot | @Buffy I don't agree, breaking new ground is called research and can definitely be peer reviewed. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 12:55 | comment | added | Buffy | Sometimes, due to the nature of the work, there are no peers. This is especially true if the organization is breaking new ground. Sometimes the peer review goes on inside the organization before the report ever gets written. I think climate science can be like this. There is a lot of internal discussion (and argument) before the world ever sees the ideas. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 12:07 | comment | added | Ian | Another factor is that their staff do not require peer reviewed publications to keep their jobs, and to get new jobs. Hence that don't need to play the "citation count" games that university staff do. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 8:58 | comment | added | xLeitix | @HermanToothrot Sure, but writing a peer-reviewed paper costs time and money (both not things that most NGOs have excessive amounts of). If it does not help them, why do it? | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 8:55 | comment | added | Herman Toothrot | I agree with these points but not completely with point number 2, if you publish a peer-reviewed article there is nothing stopping you to create a separate document or report that presents the same results in a more accessible way. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 8:48 | comment | added | xLeitix | There may also be a fourth, slightly more nefarious, reason. NGOs are political players, some of their findings may not withstand a careful examination of their methods. That is, I don't question the good intentions of a vast majority of NGOs, but they inherently have an agenda. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 8:17 | history | answered | Maarten Buis | CC BY-SA 4.0 |