5.1 Beyond Peer Review

A Note from Your Authors:

Academics and librarians have historically evaluated information based on their ‘reliability’ or ‘trustworthiness’. In many work settings, we need to make decisions quickly, so this approach makes sense. It’s efficient to label some sources as more credible than others and ignore those that fall outside of those boundaries. Think back to the ‘hierarchy of scientific evidence’ pyramid from Chapter 3: it implies that how a source is created automatically determines its worth. A knowledge justice approach asks us to acknowledge the benefits and role of each knowledge source and then look beyond it for the voices and perspectives that are otherwise missing. We’ll discuss this more in the video below.

To learn more about the academic publishing process, check out the description from PLoS.