Let’s do the ten-thousand view first. Later, we can pick and pull on some specifics and maybe examine each and every paper one at a time.
The easiest thing for you to do is to access the Late Breaking Website News: Updated December 1, 2014. Then from the top read down the page until you arrive at the a headline dated November 6. That’s it; everything below that is old news.
I noticed some things, in particular:
1) First of all there is the new St. Louis Conference page. I imagine this will be the focus for most of us.
2) There is the wonderful news about SEAM’s new home. See Status Update on the New Mexico Shroud of Turin Museum in this blog.
3) I noticed Barrie mentioning “a growing trend by some Shroud researchers to post their papers and articles on Academia.edu, a website that provides a forum for researchers to publish their own work online.”
There was this warning from Barrie: “Just remember that many of these have not withstood the scrutiny of peer review so any claims they make or conclusions they draw have probably not been verified scientifically.”
Fair enough. That is true. But given the state of what sometimes passes for peer review these days with the many new and sometimes predatory open access and vanity journals, I’m not sure it is a big deal. See:
- When it Comes to the Shroud of Turin, Has Peer Review Lost its Luster?
- And you thought you knew all about peer reviewed journals
- Email of the Day
It also raises a big question; is a conference paper a peer reviewed paper? I think many people think so. I don’t.