An examination of power paradigm controls, peer review and scholarly communication. It covers issues such as: silencing scholars within totalitarian and democratic forms of government; intellectual freedom, intellectual suppression, the big lie and the freedom to lie; and rhetoric versus reality.

The freedom of academics to pursue knowledge and truth in their research, writing, and teaching is a fundamental principle of contemporary higher education in the United States. But this freedom has been hard won and regularly abridged, reinterpreted, and violated. Academic freedom has been central to many issues and controversies in higher education and has thus generated literature in a variety of disciplines. This book provides access to that literature. Included are entries for nearly 500 books, chapters, articles, reports, web sites, and other sources of information about academic freedom. Each entry includes a descriptive annotation, and the entries are grouped in topical chapters. While most of the works cited were published since the 1940 American Association of University Professors Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, some older studies have also been included. Though the volume focuses primarily on higher education in the U.S., it also includes a chapter on academic freedom in other countries.

This collection of essays comes from the international project "Science and Democracy". It offers an examination of several controversial issues, within and about science, of wide-ranging social relevance. A partial list runs as follows: the role of scientific technology in shaping our life; the influence of corporations on contemporary medicine; grass-roots activism and new technologies; environmental constraints on economical growth; the HIV/AIDS controversy; the Wakefield trial and the MMR vaccine-autism link; the organ transplant ideology and business; the debate on the terrorist attacks in USA of September 11, 2001; the role of whistleblowers in science; etc. - Contributions by J. Barretto Bastos Filho, H. Bauer, M. Brown, M. C. Danhoni Neves, F. Fabbri, P. Ghisellini, S. Lang, A. Liversidge, C. Loré, M. Mamone Capria, R. Maruotti, D. Mastrangelo, S. Maurano, M. Mazzucco, D. Rasnick, S. Siminovic, S. Ulgiati, M. Walker.

In the 21st century, corporations have worked their way into government and, as they become increasingly more powerful, arguments about their involvement with public health have become increasingly black and white. With corporations at the center of public health and environmental issues, everything chemical or technological is good, everything natural is bad; scientists who are funded by corporations are right and those who are independent are invariably wrong. There is diminishing common ground between the two opposed sides in these arguments. Corporate Ties that Bind is a collection of essays written by influential academic scholars, activists, and epidemiologists from around the world that scrutinize the corporate reasoning, false science and trickery involving those, like in-house epidemiologists, who mediate the scientific message of organizations who attack and censure independent voices. This book addresses how the growth of corporatism is destroying liberal democracy and personal choice. Whether addressing asbestos, radiation, PCBs, or vaccine regulation, the essays here address the dangers of trusting corporations and uncover the lengths to which corporations put profits before health.

Peer review is the process by which submissions to journals and presses are evaluated with regard to suitability for publication. Armed with the results of numerous empirical studies, critics have leveled a variety of harsh charges against peer review such as: reviewers and editors are biased toward authors from prestigious institutions, peer review is biased toward established ideas, and it does a poor job of detecting errors and fraud. While an immense literature has sprouted on peer review in the sciences and social sciences, Peer Review is the first book-length, wide-ranging study of peer review that utilizes methods and resources of contemporary philosophy. Its six chapters cover the following topics: the tension between peer review and the liberal notion that truth emerges when ideas proliferate in the marketplace of ideas; arguments for and against blind review of submissions; the alleged conservatism of peer review; the anomalous nature of book reviewing; the status of non-peer-reviewed publications, such as invited articles or Internet publications, in tenure and promotion cases; and the future of peer review in the age of the Internet. The author has also included several key readings about peer review.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Nobody should have a monopoly of the truth in this universe. The censorship and suppression of challenging ideas against the tide of mainstream research, the blacklisting of scientists, for instance, is neither the best way to do and filter science, nor to promote progress in the human knowledge. The removal of good and novel ideas from the scientific stage is very detrimental to the pursuit of the truth. There are instances in which a mere unqualified belief can occasionally be converted into a generally accepted scientific theory through the screening action of refereed literature and meetings planned by the scientific organizing committees and through the distribution of funds controlled by "club opinions". It leads to unitary paradigms and unitary thinking not necessarily associated to the unique truth. This is the topic of this book: to critically analyze the problems of the official (and sometimes illicit) mechanisms under which current science (physics and astronomy in particular) is being administered and filtered today, along with the onerous consequences these mechanisms have on all of us. Apart from the editors, Juan Miguel Campanario, Brian Martin, Wolfgang Kundt, J. Marvin Herndon, Marian Apostol, Halton C. Arp, Tom Van Flandern, Andrei P. Kirilyuk, Dmitri Rabounski and Henry H. Bauer, all of them professional researchers, reveal a pessimistic view of the miseries of the actual system, while a glimmer of hope remains in the "leitmotiv" claim towards the freedom in doing research and attaining an acceptable level of ethics in science.