You’re only as good as how much you’re disseminated.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Grisha Perelman. You’ve discovered a valid proof for the Poincare Conjecture. Upon discovering the proof, you go back to sleep in your mother’s house, and proceed to play Tetris till you die.
Question: Would anyone know you’re good?
Answer: No. Why? Because you’re only as good as how much you’re disseminated.
Whilst the scenario above is a jest at that the brilliant (and slightly loony if you ask me) Russian mathematician, the fact remains that if you, or your work is not widely disseminated, you or your work won’t even be considered good.
Consider Ramanujan, the great Indian mathematician. If he didn’t leave India for England, all of his proofs will then be considered non-existant, even if he did have the smarts and did manage to prove them (he had these notebooks where he wrote them, and they weren’t discovered till the late 1970s).
In the academic world, getting published in a peer-reviewed journal is the exposure one needs to prove one’s work is good. Getting in a peer-reviewed journal is how everone will be exposed to the work. In the real world, though (and also, increasingly in the academic world), peer-review isn’t the only thing.
Peer-review in academia works because the experts who are reviewing the work do so in an impartial manner. To compound that further, a journal article is reviewed by not one, but multiple reviewers, to further affirm the quality of the said article.
Of course we hear news like Merck sponsoring journals for a biased article; and the existence of peer-reviewed creationist science (*snort, what an oxymoron) journals. So while peer-review isn’t perfect (no one system, in my opinion, is perfect), it most certainly has significantly more quality than say, your Sunday paper’s opinion column.
Of course, the key factor behind the relative success of peer-review is that each reviewer acts independently and impartially. In the real world, we cannot get that. More often than not, an issue polarizes opinion.
Take the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller. Opinions polarized between those who think that the murder was justified, to those who think that the murder was terrorism. Which is correct?
It is a hard question to answer. We try our best not to judge in issues. Afterall, one man’s meat may be another man’s poison.
The quality of the content is variable to each person. And that is what we at Pressyo are trying to do. We’re trying to present to people, good content. The audience part of the equation is a piece of cake. The main problem lies with the content quality part.
That’s what we’re striving for. The work will always be in progress (until such a time when Skynet our system can read human minds), and that’s what we’re striving for – identifying quality.