Does Open Scientific Communication Increase the Quality of Knowledge?

It was a pleasure to read the rich, sometimes even breathtaking target article by Brian A. Nosek and Yoav Bar-Anan (this issue) on a utopia of open scientific communication. The authors start from the premise that the purpose of public science is knowledge accumulation, and propose a sequence of six steps that would increasingly take us away from the current model of scientific communication with its mixture of public and private communication channels to a utopia of rapid, open, and extensive communication. The sequence of the steps makes sense, but does each step serve the purpose of public science? In my view the most urgent problems of today’s psychological science are not slow speed of dissemination, nontransparent decision processes, or restricted communication options. Instead, psychological research accumulates a vast body of bits and pieces of knowledge that are produced by scientists, institutions, and journal editors that increasingly strive to maximize impact instead of quality by focusing on jazzy “unique contributions” instead of contributing to a common cumulative progress based on rock-solid findings. Consequently the disseminated knowledge is to a large degree nonreplicable and lacks serious theoretical foundation and integration. Therefore let’s look at the proposed sequence from the somewhat different perspective that the purpose of public science is the accumulation of high-quality knowledge.