#peer-review — Public Fediverse posts

Metamodernism and the Recovery of Metaphysics

Metaphysics concerns some of the deepest questions of philosophical thought: What exists? What is reality? What can human beings know? What does it mean to exist? And how should human beings understand meaning and value?

Although metaphysics was central to early modern philosophy, later developments placed increasing pressure on its claims.

Modern philosophy increasingly examined the limits of human reason. Scientific approaches emphasized empirical verification. Logical positivism challenged metaphysical statements that could not be empirically established. Postmodernism then questioned assumptions about universal truth, stable meaning, language, culture, history, and power.

Yet metaphysical questions did not disappear.

They continued to emerge through questions concerning reality, existence, change, humanity, meaning, and experience. The article “Metamodernism and the Recovery of Metaphysics” explores whether these questions can be reopened through the framework of metamodernism.

What Is Metamodernism?

Metamodernism can be understood as an attempt to move beyond the opposition between modernism and postmodernism.

Rather than completely rejecting modern aspirations or postmodern skepticism, metamodernism attempts to hold both in productive tension.

Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker describe metamodernism through an oscillation between apparently opposing positions:

• Modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony
• Hope and melancholy
• Naïveté and knowingness
• Empathy and apathy
• Unity and plurality
• Totality and fragmentation

The important point is that metamodernism does not simply return to modern confidence.

It recognizes human limitations while reopening possibilities for discussing truth, meaning, hope, progress, and reality.

Hanzi Freinacht develops this idea further by describing metamodernism as a synthesis of modern ambition and postmodern critique. This approach attempts to preserve the desire for progress and meaning while maintaining awareness of irony, skepticism, and fallibility.

The Modern Construction of Metaphysics

Modernity did not begin by rejecting metaphysics.

On the contrary, philosophers such as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza constructed large metaphysical systems dealing with God, humanity, the soul, and the universe.

Metaphysics was therefore deeply connected with the modern philosophical project.

The transformation happened gradually.

Immanuel Kant represented an important turning point. His philosophical project examined the limits of human reason and changed the focus of metaphysics from simply describing reality toward investigating the conditions and boundaries of human knowledge.

The rise of empirical science intensified these questions.

Claims that could not be physically verified became increasingly difficult to defend within certain philosophical traditions. Logical positivism eventually treated metaphysical statements as lacking cognitive significance.

Postmodernism added another layer.

Language, history, culture, and power became central to understanding how human beings interpret reality.

However, there is a crucial philosophical distinction:

The limitation of human knowledge does not necessarily imply the non-existence of reality.

This distinction creates an opportunity for metaphysical recovery.

Why Recover Metaphysics?

Recovering metaphysics does not mean restoring old systems exactly as they were.

The article explicitly distinguishes recovery from return.

A return would mean attempting to restore dogmatic certainty.

A recovery instead means reconsidering metaphysics after modern and postmodern critiques have been taken seriously.

This approach accepts that:

• Human knowledge is limited.
• Interpretations can be historically and culturally influenced.
• Absolute certainty may be unattainable.
• Reality can nevertheless remain a legitimate subject of inquiry.
• Meaning and truth need not be abandoned because certainty is difficult.

The result is a more open conception of metaphysics.

Three Principles for a Metamodern Metaphysics

The proposed framework can be understood through three major dimensions.

1. Realism Without Absoluteness

The epistemological dimension begins with the recognition that reality exists beyond the individual mind.

However, human interpretations of reality are always limited.

This creates a position between absolute certainty and radical skepticism.

We can recognize reality without claiming that our understanding of it is complete.

2. Dynamism Without Nihilism

The ontological dimension understands reality as dynamic.

Things change.

Human beings change.

Relationships change.

The world is not necessarily a collection of permanently fixed objects.

Yet acknowledging change does not require nihilism.

Transformation does not eliminate meaning.

The fact that reality is dynamic can itself become part of our understanding of existence.

3. Interconnectedness Without Relativism

The axiological dimension emphasizes relationships.

Human values and actions emerge within relationships and concrete conditions.

People do not exist as isolated subjects completely detached from their surroundings.

At the same time, recognizing relationality does not require the conclusion that every claim about truth is merely subjective.

This allows interconnectedness to be recognized without collapsing into total relativism.

Metaphysics as an Existential Question

Traditional metaphysics often asks:

What exists?

But a metamodern approach can extend the question:

What does it mean to exist?

And further:

How is existence experienced?

The difference is significant.

A person can intellectually understand that everything changes while experiencing personally what it means to live through change.

Similarly, understanding human relationality theoretically is different from experiencing one’s connection with nature, history, culture, and other people.

Metaphysics therefore becomes connected to lived experience.

It is not merely knowledge about existence; it can become reflection emerging from within existence.

Nāgārjuna: Emptiness and Dependent Origination

Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy challenges the belief that things possess an independent and permanent intrinsic essence.

His concept of śūnyatā, or emptiness, is closely associated with pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination.

This does not simply mean that nothing exists.

Instead, things exist through conditions and relationships.

The philosophical significance is considerable.

One can question the idea of rigid, independently existing entities without denying the reality of the world.

This provides a framework for thinking about existence through interconnectedness.

Guō Xiàng: Reality as an Internal Process of Transformation

Guō Xiàng, associated with the interpretation of the Zhuāngzǐ, offers a different perspective.

His thought emphasizes zìrán, understood in the context of spontaneous natural processes.

Reality does not necessarily require a rigid metaphysical center outside the universe.

Instead, reality can be understood as a continuous process of transformation.

This perspective allows us to recognize instability and change without concluding that existence has lost meaning.

Human beings participate in this transformation through their bodies, experiences, relationships, and everyday lives.

Mullā Ṣadrā: Being, Gradation and Substantial Motion

Mullā Ṣadrā provides another distinctive metaphysical framework.

His philosophy emphasizes wujūd, or existence, as foundational to reality.

Existence is not simply static.

The concept of tashkīk al-wujūd, or gradation of being, recognizes different degrees or intensities of existence.

Mullā Ṣadrā also develops the concept of al-ḥarakah al-jawhariyyah, or substantial motion, through which change occurs within the nature of substance itself.

Human existence can therefore be understood as a process of becoming rather than as something completely finished.

Different Traditions, Shared Questions

These philosophical traditions should not be artificially merged.

Nāgārjuna, Guō Xiàng, and Mullā Ṣadrā operate within substantially different intellectual and religious contexts.

Nevertheless, their differences reveal something important.

There is more than one way to think about reality beyond the simple choice between:

permanent static existence

and

complete non-existence.

Relationships, transformation, processes, and becoming provide alternative philosophical categories.

The article connects this approach with aspects of Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics, particularly its rejection of an exclusively static picture of reality.

Metaphysics Without Dogmatism

A recovered metaphysics does not need to claim that it possesses the final answer.

It can instead become an open intellectual practice.

It can ask questions while acknowledging uncertainty.

It can recognize reality without claiming absolute knowledge.

It can accept change without embracing nihilism.

It can recognize interconnectedness without reducing truth to personal preference.

The article describes this as a movement toward metaphysics that is aware of its own limitations.

Why These Questions Still Matter Today

The technological and cultural environment may change, but the fundamental questions of existence remain.

Human beings continue to ask:

• What is reality?
• What does it mean to exist?
• Can reality be known?
• How should change be understood?
• What gives existence meaning?
• How are human beings connected?
• Can truth remain meaningful when certainty is limited?

Metamodernism does not necessarily answer these questions once and for all.

Its contribution may instead be to create a framework in which they can be asked again.

This is particularly important because complete skepticism can be as limiting as complete certainty.

If absolute certainty is impossible, that does not necessarily mean that every philosophical question is meaningless.

There may be a space between dogmatic certainty and radical skepticism.

Metamodernism attempts to explore that space.

Conclusion: Recovering the Courage to Ask

The article concludes that metamodernism offers a fresh space for reflecting on the relationship between certainty and doubt.

It does not require an absolute choice between modern optimism and postmodern skepticism.

Instead, it preserves awareness of human limitations while maintaining the human desire for truth, meaning, direction, and purpose.

For metaphysics, this means that recovery does not require the resurrection of old philosophical systems.

It means reopening questions about reality with greater humility.

Three principles summarize the proposed direction:

Realism without absoluteness.

Dynamism without nihilism.

Interconnectedness without relativism.

Ultimately, the philosophical question returns to its most fundamental form:

What does it mean for something to exist, and what does it mean for human beings to experience that existence?

Perhaps the recovery of metaphysics begins not with a final answer, but with the willingness to ask the question again.

"Diamond Reviewer Pledge" by @FORRT for #PeerReview in #DiamondOpenAccess journals:
https://forrt.org/diamond-reviewer/
#OpenAccess

📢 New issue from our 2026 PREreview Champions interview series

Read from Shitondo Yahila about his experience and learnings from organizing an Open Science symposium for students and ERCs at the University of Zambia together with the Review and Curate Network.

🔖 https://content.prereview.org/interview-prereview-champion-shitondo-yahila/

#OpenScience #PeerReview #Preprint

Interesting initiative I just became aware of:

#Peerreview is a finite resource, and every review invitation presents a choice about where our time goes. The Diamond Reviewer Pledge asks researchers to commit to reviewing at least one article a year for a #diamond #openaccess journal — free to publish, free to read, and run by the scholarly community. It takes a minute to sign and helps sustain the journals that keep research open to everyone. Learn more and join:

http://forrt.org/diamond-reviewer

I just noticed something troubling about AI training datasets cited in a paper that I'm reviewing: there are lots of them that have been labelled by amateur dilettantes. The people who created them describe themselves only as things like "data scientist" and state no expertise at all in the subjects that they are classifying. Sometimes you don't need a lot of specialist expertise but I have just been looking at some body language datasets that I wouldn't entrust the labelling to without expertise in behavioural psychology. Certainly not to a run-of-the-mill computer scientist. Yet engineers are using these datasets to write papers for publication, even as they point out that non-expert humans do a terrible job of reading the postures and facial expressions. Somehow they've overlooked the GIGO risk here. So have the journals' reviewers and editors.

How did academia get this relaxed about the quality of evidence?

#AI #peerReview

Modern #ScientificPublishing often incentivizes overstating results at the expense of ensuring rigor. @maxkrummel &co test #DiscoveryStack, which seeks to realign #PeerReview with its core purpose by separating the assessment of quality & impact @PLOSBiology https://plos.io/4yqkTrN

#navierstokes : "this entire staged event serves a #desperate financial agenda in a pre ipo panic facing the slowdown of scaling laws and growing investor skepticism over the profitability of foundational models #openai needs to manufacture an #artificialsputnikmoment claiming to solve a #millenniumprize without immediately submitting the proof to traditional #peerreview means using the prestige of fundamental #mathematics as cheap marketing fuel to inflate a #delusionalvaluation!!!

https://x.com/bettercallmedhi/status/2097472336257863722?s=46

I've been asked to peer-review a perspective article. I found some parts I think are inaccurate, that need further reflection or need to made clearer. Other parts I simply disagreed with or wanted to respond to. After discussing it with the editor, we agreed to split it into presenting the first types of issues in my peer-review (and hopefully have them improved), while I'll move the second type of issues into an opinion article where I respond to the original perspective article. Better for all parties, I think.

#PeerReview #ScientificPublishing #ScientificJournals

The peer-review system can itself be studied with data.

An analysis of 110,303 submissions to Science and Science Advances finds strong links between publication success, institutional prestige, research topic and author location.

🔗 https://phys.org/news/2026-07-analysis-prestige-topic-published.html

#ScienceOfScience #PeerReview #Research

From this perspective on AI and "peer" review, I'm surprised to actually not see any increase in the rate of growth of articles with LLMs?
https://www.science.org/content/article/can-ai-help-solve-peer-review-crisis-here-are-its-promises-and-pitfalls #AcademicPublishing #PeerReview #AI

Peer review is "the bedrock of science" – and "it's not standing strong" right now. 🔬🧪

Saima Sidik for Ars Technika.

👉 https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/peer-review-is-overwhelmed-can-it-survive-in-the-ai-era/

#science #peerreview #ai

📣 Join our editorial team and support scientific open source!

We have new scientific Python packages waiting on peer review, and need editors with domain expertise to help guide them through.

Looking for backgrounds in:
⚛️ Physics
🧪 Chemistry
😷 Public health

Editors recruit reviewers, facilitate conversation, and help authors cross the finish line. Flexible commitment, full onboarding + support provided.

Apply: https://bit.ly/pyoseditor

#Science #OpenSource #PeerReview #pyOpenSci

With systematic institutional de-funding and ongoing stigmatisation comes the erosion of academic community. This is the case for US #anthropology here, but
the same can be observed for other targeted disciplines, particularly in the humanities. #peerreview without peers results in no review.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:45agxc42amzvl3vpnr2tl5xj/post/3mucvlmyvns2x

New study: At Nature Communications (2016-2022), papers approved by #OpenPeerReview had higher #altmetrics scores than papers approved by conventional #PeerReview.
www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9...

#Impact #ScholComm

Does Open Peer Review Correlat...

New study: At Nature Communications (2016-2022), papers approved by #OpenPeerReview had higher #altmetrics scores than papers approved by conventional #PeerReview.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9962990/v1

#Impact #Metrics #ScholComm

added to my #toReadList: "On the defence of responsible human judgement in #peerreview by Soares & Adams, link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cjce.70497

If you don’t have access, you can read the article in your browser via this link: https://rdcu.be/fCrll.

And if you’d like a PDF version, head over to RG: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/413676790_Poor_bibliometric_studies_do_not_make_bibliometrics_poor_science_a_response_to_Ellegaard

#Bibliometrics #Scientometrics #ResearchQuality #MetaScience #BibliometricAnalysis #PeerReview

From Volunteerism to Duty: Reforming Peer Review with Tokens | Communications of the ACM
https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3770921?download=true

An interesting idea on how to incentivise peer-review by conditioning the ability to publish on it.

#research #academia #peerReview

🔖 Read the latest issue from our 2026 PREreview Champions interview series!

This time Mabel Omoniwa underscores the impact of moving from theory to practice in Open Science advocacy, and shares her experience turning her learnings from the Champions program into engaging opportunities for the African research community.

👉 https://content.prereview.org/interview-prereview-champion-mabel-omoniwa/

#OpenScience #PeerReview

Tracking, Valuing and Evaluating the Diversity of HSS Research Outputs

This was originally a script for a video I recorded for a meeting of the Australian Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA) group. It is addressed to those who are in institutional positions who need to make judgements about the qualities of research outputs in Humanities and Social Sciences with a particular focus on outputs that are “non-traditional” (actually often very “traditional” in their field!) or otherwise “not easily measurable by a STEM audience”.

In my view there are two key roles for those specifically engaged in supporting those doing HSS research. The first is to advocate for financial systems that can support small and numerous research projects and the funders who want to support them. The second key role is to defend the diversity of research practices, outputs and impacts in HSS and to create a meaningful narrative around their qualities for institutional audiences.

I’m going to focus on the second here, but I wanted to link both to underline the point that what is of value in HSS research is precisely its diversity, and its difference from the homogeneity and scale of conventional STEM research and its outputs. There is not infrequently a greater diversity of research outputs from single HSS groups, centres and departments than there is from entire faculties of science, engineering and medicine.

That diversity is at the core of the value that HSS research and scholarship brings to the table. 

Every social epistemology of knowledge from Latour to Longino via Merton, Ravetz, Kuhn and Fleck have at their heart the idea that the core is the negotiation of knowledge across boundaries, or between groups. This places diversity, of all kinds, at the heart of this process, and linked to it the institutional systems that keep it alive. Arguably it is the purpose of a university to support and bring into contact diverse approaches, experiences and ways of knowing.

The issue of course is that managing that diversity is a challenge. At the scale of a university, systems are a necessity. Consistency is needed and economies of scale are real. Particularly in HSS but across other disciplines as well, it is impossible for any leader to be across the detail of how good every specific body of work is. If you believe in the argument for diversity then this as it should be – anything else would be a sign of insufficient diversity. That doesn’t mean that leaders can’t be effective at telling the stories about why diverse research matters. Nor does it mean that they can’t make judgement calls on the distribution of resources. But it means those decisions are subjective and contextual. And that the evidence that supports them will be specific to each case.

But that doesn’t solve the problem either. So what are the pragmatic and principled approaches available to addressing this complexity? In my view the key lies in separating out the challenge into two parts, one relatively straightforward and immediately useful, the other more complex but I would argue ultimately tractable.

An important, but oddly overlooked distinction in research evaluation and particularly technology discussions is the distinction between tracking outputs and evaluating them. There is often a tendency to lump these together and to imagine for example, that if scholarly books were better tracked then that would necessarily mean there would be improved citation data for them. The homogeneity of STEM research outputs means that issues with data coverage and completeness are often conflated to the question “is it indexed” using the presence of a specific journal in a specific database both as a reliable marker of quality itself but also of confidence in the quality and relevance of generally accepted performance data.

So, although this is an oversimplification, in STEM the tracking of outputs is standardised and homogenous. You look it up in an index like Web of Science.

In HSS, and particularly for creative works, the situation is far more complex. Institutions generally have very poor data on the scope and volume of creative outputs, or other forms of (so-called) “non-traditional” outputs. Work done by Niamh Quigley, within the COKI team (Quigley, 2022) showed generally used recording systems (systems like Symplectic, Pure and the like) tended to be poor at capturing aspects of research outputs important to creative researchers. Further, there was a tendency for the information that was manually inputted by researchers (that they care enough to type in!) to be stripped away as it made its way through institutional systems to the data warehouses used for high level analysis.

From a systems perspective what is needed is systems that make it easy for creative practice researchers to register outputs, to flexibly record the evidence that they consider important about the qualities of these works, and to also make it easy for institutions in turn to gather that information up. Recent technical developments provide improved paths to making this happen.

The Open Research Contributor and ID (ORCID) system provides a mechanism for researchers to authoritatively identify themselves, and to record outputs they have contributed to. In 2025 ORCID have increased the number of work types (Petro, 2025) to include a range relevant in humanities (including images, video, designs, sound and other creative works) as well as improving the mapping of some other relevant work types including reports. A researcher can choose what works they make visible, and thereby designate as “research”. This is an important distinction for some creative workers. Institutions can then harvest those outputs without requiring further work from researchers. 

ORCID doesn’t solve all the problems though. Badly implemented as an institutional system it is yet another place creative researchers have to battle through manually adding their work while colleagues in STEM subjects have it all done for them by journal publishers. Critical to making this work is a commitment from you and your teams that ORCID be the only place researchers have to make sure their work is available and pulling that information from ORCID is an institutional responsibility.

But that still leaves the manual input issue. There isn’t – currently – a complete solution for that (although one – or several – could be built) but there is at least a solution that offers some additional value for creative researchers. Zenodo is a large scale repository, managed by CERN (yes the particle accelerator in Switzerland CERN) that offers a place for anyone to deposit research outputs. It provides a safe, publicly accessible platform from which researchers can showcase their work. It even allows for dark deposit for those creative researchers who need to restrict access to the core of their work for artistic, ethical or commercial reasons.

Most importantly Zenodo provides DataCite DOIs and this means that – while you do have to manually put information into Zenodo – that information can automatically flow through to ORCID. One place to input the information and then it can flow to the other places it needs to be.

This flow of information should be the case for any repository that integrates with DataCite (or Crossref) to provide DOIs. Zenodo is large scale and flexible, but there can be an argument for specialist repositories. I am generally sceptical of the value of creating new local repositories, whether at institutions or nationally, but the key questions to ask of any repository are “does it integrate with DOI providers” and “does it provide the recording functionality creative research practitioners need”? That flexibility is key and Zenodo has some strengths here that can also help us to address, if not yet fully solve, the second problem. 

Creative practice researchers know the reasons that their work is important, and can help provide evidence of that. But that evidence is highly diverse. 

I know the pressures that institutional leaders face to articulate a comparative quantitative value of research outputs to the rest of the university. And I would argue that we nonetheless need to collectively hold the line that this makes no sense. If you value a diversity of research and researchers, you can’t protect that diversity by homogenising the way that value is measured. 

But that doesn’t mean we can’t articulate value. It doesn’t mean we can’t compare how disparate research projects and outputs achieve specific goals. It just means, in the best tradition of HSS scholarship, that the evidence that we use is contextual. That it is diverse.

And here is how repositories like Zenodo can help. Where they support the creation of packages of work, researchers can bundle up the work itself with evidence of its value and impact. This will start unstructured, but over time, and in collaboration with research communities it will be possible to develop some standards. For specific cases. Where appropriate. This might mean giving some background on the gallery that invited an exhibition, the footfall or an audience survey. It might be details of the film festival that selected a documentary for screening, or audience numbers when it was syndicated or broadcast. It might be structured in a particular way to make it easier to process (or even generate). But the key is to build on systems that always allow for the flexibility of a narrative statement that allows for the flexibility that research statements already provide. 

This workflow places researchers in control, gives them flexibility they need to provide access and to evidence the value of their work. It provides a single point of entry from which communities, institutions, and others can draw in the data to help track those outputs and collate the evidence of their value. It is not controlled by corporate interests but by academic communities. It is not subject to the funding whims of one national government but an international set of consortia.

Perhaps best of all, this is an area where the humanities and social sciences can lead. It solves a problem by putting researchers in control while supporting institutional needs. It helps and simplifies monitoring while offering a path to gathering more sophisticated evidence to tell better stories. These are not problems that are restricted to HSS, but you could argue that much of STEM evaluation has lost its way, focusing on numbers instead of substance, journal lists instead of journal content, impact factors instead of actual impact. This recontextualisation, and re-situation is where humanities and social sciences scholars, and leadership can show a way to better forms of evaluation.

References

• Petro, J. 2025. ORCID and Humanities: Celebrating the New Year with New Work Types. ORCID Blog. ORCID. https://info.orcid.org/new-work-types/.
• Quigley, N. 2022. Increasing the visibility of grey literature: Project report (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6501506.

How to peer review a paper in 2026
https://jilltxt.net/how-to-peer-review-a-paper-in-2026/

#academicchatter #PeerReview

Can #GenAI help scrutinise the scientific literature, not just create it?

:doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-026-09761-0

In our new paper, we tested #ChatGPT and #DeepSeek as triage tools for post-publication peer review. The result: useful potential, but human verification remains essential.

#ResearchIntegrity #PeerReview #LLMs #ScholarlyCommunication

🤦‍♂️ " #NIH Wants to Remove Peer Review Scores From #Grant Applications "

#science #political #PeerReview

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/08/17/nih-wants-remove-peer-review-scores-grant-applications

NIH is proposing a change on how they report back review outcomes on grant applications. Rather than providing a specific impact score, applications would be put into one of three categories, "most competitive," "competitive," and "not discussed." https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-26-088.html

cc @petersuber

#AcademicChatter #PeerReview #NIH

Ars Technica: Peer review is overwhelmed—can it survive in the AI era?. “The number of papers indexed in the databases Scopus and Web of Science, for example, has recently been increasing exponentially, at a rate of 5.6 percent per year. By one estimate, researchers around the globe are devoting a collective 15,000 years of work to peer review every year—work that, if paid, would cost $1.5 […]

An AI system has written scientific papers that passed peer review, out-performing more than half of human submissions. This step raises questions about how AI will reshape scientific research, peer review, and the evaluation of scientific contributions.

Learn more about how AI affects the industry and #PeerReview: https://cacm.acm.org/news/ai-prepped-paper-passed-peer-review-now-what/