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closeWho cares who I am?
Posted by monzop on 15 Jan 2009 at 09:31 GMT
This may sound a little provocative, but: Why should anybody need to be identified in science?
In the end, our job is to improve knowledge, which is a common good, and the importance of our findings and ideas is in the results, not in who did it.
The only person that really care about your work is you.
There are several arguments in favour of anonymous publishing, including the fact that the reviewing process would be probably more fair, the reduced pressure for people to publish (wether this pressure is real or perceived, and self applied or derived from the environment) and consequently a reduced amount of irrelevant publications, the fact that more focus will be on the actual science than on the scientist.
Of course, anonymous publishing is an extreme possibility, but it sources from the present extreme situation in which all emphasis is on individual scientists, on success, on competition, and the science is just an instrument. This is a very sad and dangerous situation: one that deserves more thought form the scientific community: what about a paper in PLoS journals?