Feminism
Feminism is a range of political movements and social movements that share a common goal: to define and achieve the political, economic and social equality of the genders. This includes fighting gender stereotypes and seeking to establish educational and professional opportunities for women that are equal to those for men. Feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women's rights, including the right to vote, to hold public office, to work, to earn fair wages or equal pay, to own property, to receive education, to enter contracts, to have equal rights within marriage, to have maternity leave. Feminists have worked to ensure access to legal abortions and social integration, to protect women and girls from rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence. Changes in dress and acceptable physical activity have been part of feminist movements; some scholars consider feminist campaigns to be a main force behind major historical societal changes for women's rights in the West, where they are near-universally credited with achieving women's suffrage, gender neutrality in English, reproductive rights for women, the right to enter into contracts and own property.
Although feminist advocacy is, has been focused on women's rights, some feminists, including bell hooks, argue for the inclusion of men's liberation within its aims because they believe that men are harmed by traditional gender roles. Feminist theory, which emerged from feminist movements, aims to understand the nature of gender inequality by examining women's social roles and lived experience. Numerous feminist movements and ideologies have developed over the years and represent different viewpoints and aims; some forms of feminism have been criticized for taking into account only white, middle class, college-educated perspectives. This criticism led to the creation of ethnically specific or multicultural forms of feminism, including black feminism and intersectional feminism. Charles Fourier, a Utopian Socialist and French philosopher, is credited with having coined the word "féminisme" in 1837; the words "féminisme" and "féministe" first appeared in France and the Netherlands in 1872, Great Britain in the 1890s, the United States in 1910, the Oxford English Dictionary lists 1852 as the year of the first appearance of "feminist" and 1895 for "feminism".
Depending on the historical moment and country, feminists around the world have had different causes and goals. Most western feminist historians contend that all movements working to obtain women's rights should be considered feminist movements when they did not apply the term to themselves. Other historians assert that the term should be limited to the modern feminist movement and its descendants; those historians use the label "protofeminist" to describe earlier movements. The history of the modern western feminist movements is divided into three "waves"; each wave dealt with different aspects of the same feminist issues. The first wave comprised women's suffrage movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, promoting women's right to vote; the second wave was associated with the ideas and actions of the women's liberation movement beginning in the 1960s. The second wave campaigned for social equality for women; the third wave is a continuation of, a reaction to, the perceived failures of second-wave feminism, which began in the 1990s.
First-wave feminism was a period of activity during early twentieth century. In the UK and the US, it focused on the promotion of equal contract, marriage and property rights for women. By the end of the 19th century, a number of important steps had been made with the passing of legislation such as the UK Custody of Infants Act 1839 which introduced the Tender years doctrine for child custody arrangement and gave women the right of custody of their children for the first time. Other legislation such as the Married Women's Property Act 1870 in the UK and extended in the 1882 Act, these became models for similar legislation in other British territories. For example, Victoria passed legislation in 1884, New South Wales in 1889, the remaining Australian colonies passed similar legislation between 1890 and 1897. Therefore, with the turn of the 19th century activism had focused on gaining political power the right of women's suffrage, though some feminists were active in campaigning for women's sexual and economic rights as well.
Women's suffrage began in Britain's Australasian colonies at the close of the 19th century, with the self-governing colonies of New Zealand granting women the right to vote in 1893 and South Australia granting female suffrage in 1895. This was followed by Australia granting female suffrage in 1902. In Britain the Suffragettes and the Suffragists campaigned for the women's vote, in 1918 the Representation of the People Act was passed granting the vote to women over the age of 30 who owned property. In 1928 this was extended to all women over 21. Emmeline Pankhurst was the most notable activist in England, with Time naming her one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century stating: "she shaped an idea of women for our time. In the U. S. notable leaders of this movement included Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, who each campaigned for the abolition of slavery prior to championing women's right to vote; these women were influenced by the
History
History is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory, it is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, collection, organization and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians. History can refer to the academic discipline which uses a narrative to examine and analyse a sequence of past events, objectively determine the patterns of cause and effect that determine them. Historians sometimes debate the nature of history and its usefulness by discussing the study of the discipline as an end in itself and as a way of providing "perspective" on the problems of the present. Stories common to a particular culture, but not supported by external sources, are classified as cultural heritage or legends, because they do not show the "disinterested investigation" required of the discipline of history. Herodotus, a 5th-century BC Greek historian is considered within the Western tradition to be the "father of history", along with his contemporary Thucydides, helped form the foundations for the modern study of human history.
Their works continue to be read today, the gap between the culture-focused Herodotus and the military-focused Thucydides remains a point of contention or approach in modern historical writing. In East Asia, a state chronicle, the Spring and Autumn Annals was known to be compiled from as early as 722 BC although only 2nd-century BC texts have survived. Ancient influences have helped spawn variant interpretations of the nature of history which have evolved over the centuries and continue to change today; the modern study of history is wide-ranging, includes the study of specific regions and the study of certain topical or thematical elements of historical investigation. History is taught as part of primary and secondary education, the academic study of history is a major discipline in university studies; the word history comes from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, meaning'inquiry','knowledge from inquiry', or'judge'. It was in that sense; the ancestor word ἵστωρ is attested early on in Homeric Hymns, the Athenian ephebes' oath, in Boiotic inscriptions.
The Greek word was borrowed into Classical Latin as historia, meaning "investigation, research, description, written account of past events, writing of history, historical narrative, recorded knowledge of past events, narrative". History was borrowed from Latin into Old English as stær, but this word fell out of use in the late Old English period. Meanwhile, as Latin became Old French, historia developed into forms such as istorie and historie, with new developments in the meaning: "account of the events of a person's life, account of events as relevant to a group of people or people in general, dramatic or pictorial representation of historical events, body of knowledge relative to human evolution, narrative of real or imaginary events, story", it was from Anglo-Norman that history was borrowed into Middle English, this time the loan stuck. It appears in the 13th-century Ancrene Wisse, but seems to have become a common word in the late 14th century, with an early attestation appearing in John Gower's Confessio Amantis of the 1390s: "I finde in a bok compiled | To this matiere an old histoire, | The which comth nou to mi memoire".
In Middle English, the meaning of history was "story" in general. The restriction to the meaning "the branch of knowledge that deals with past events. With the Renaissance, older senses of the word were revived, it was in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late 16th century, when he wrote about "Natural History". For him, historia was "the knowledge of objects determined by space and time", that sort of knowledge provided by memory. In an expression of the linguistic synthetic vs. analytic/isolating dichotomy, English like Chinese now designates separate words for human history and storytelling in general. In modern German and most Germanic and Romance languages, which are solidly synthetic and inflected, the same word is still used to mean both'history' and'story'. Historian in the sense of a "researcher of history" is attested from 1531. In all European languages, the substantive history is still used to mean both "what happened with men", "the scholarly study of the happened", the latter sense sometimes distinguished with a capital letter, or the word historiography.
The adjective historical is attested from 1661, historic from 1669. Historians write in the context of their own time, with due regard to the current dominant ideas of how to interpret the past, sometimes write to provide lessons for their own society. In the words of Benedetto Croce, "All history is contemporary history". History is facilitated by the formation of a "true discourse of past" through the production of narrative and analysis of past events relating to the human race; the modern discipline of history is dedicated to the institutional production of this discourse. All events that are remembered and preserved in some authentic form constitute the historical record; the task of histori
OCLC
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Incorporated d/b/a OCLC is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services. OCLC maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system. OCLC began in 1967, as the Ohio College Library Center, through a collaboration of university presidents, vice presidents, library directors who wanted to create a cooperative computerized network for libraries in the state of Ohio; the group first met on July 5, 1967 on the campus of the Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization, hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, to design the shared cataloging system.
Kilgour wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. The plan was to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database to streamline operations, control costs, increase efficiency in library management, bringing libraries together to cooperatively keep track of the world's information in order to best serve researchers and scholars; the first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26, 1971. This was the first online cataloging by any library worldwide. Membership in OCLC is based on use of services and contribution of data. Between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. In 2002, the governance structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States.
As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with "networks", organizations that provided training and marketing services. By 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on the OCLC Members Council. During 2008, OCLC commissioned two studies to look at distribution channels. In early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center. OCLC provides bibliographic and full-text information to anyone. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog in the world. WorldCat has holding records from private libraries worldwide; the Open WorldCat program, launched in late 2003, exposed a subset of WorldCat records to Web users via popular Internet search and bookselling sites.
In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. WikiD was phased out; the Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988. A browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013; until August 2009, when it was sold to Backstage Library Works, OCLC owned a preservation microfilm and digitization operation called the OCLC Preservation Service Center, with its principal office in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The reference management service QuestionPoint provides libraries with tools to communicate with users; this around-the-clock reference service is provided by a cooperative of participating global libraries. Starting in 1971, OCLC produced catalog cards for members alongside its shared online catalog. OCLC commercially sells software, such as CONTENTdm for managing digital collections.
It offers the bibliographic discovery system WorldCat Discovery, which allows for library patrons to use a single search interface to access an institution's catalog, database subscriptions and more. OCLC has been conducting research for the library community for more than 30 years. In accordance with its mission, OCLC makes its research outcomes known through various publications; these publications, including journal articles, reports and presentations, are available through the organization's website. OCLC Publications – Research articles from various journals including Code4Lib Journal, OCLC Research, Reference & User Services Quarterly, College & Research Libraries News, Art Libraries Journal, National Education Association Newsletter; the most recent publications are displayed first, all archived resources, starting in 1970, are available. Membership Reports – A number of significant reports on topics ranging from virtual reference in libraries to perceptions about library funding. Newsletters – Current and archived newsletters for the library and archive community.
Presentations – Presentations from both guest speakers and OCLC research from conferences and other events. The presentations are organized into five categories: Conference presentations, Dewey presentations, Distinguished Seminar Series, Guest presentations, Research staff
Outline of academic disciplines
An academic discipline or field of study is a branch of knowledge and researched as part of higher education. A scholar's discipline is defined by the university faculties and learned societies to which she or he belongs and the academic journals in which she or he publishes research. Disciplines vary between well-established ones that exist in all universities and have well-defined rosters of journals and conferences and nascent ones supported by only a few universities and publications. A discipline may have branches, these are called sub-disciplines. There is no consensus on how some academic disciplines should be classified, for example whether anthropology and linguistics are disciplines of the social sciences or of the humanities; the following outline is provided as topical guide to academic disciplines. Biblical studies Religious studies Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Greek, Aramaic Buddhist theology Christian theology Anglican theology Baptist theology Catholic theology Eastern Orthodox theology Protestant theology Hindu theology Jewish theology Muslim theology Biological anthropology Linguistic anthropology Cultural anthropology Social anthropology Archaeology Accounting Business management Finance Marketing Operations management Edaphology Environmental chemistry Environmental science Gemology Geochemistry Geodesy Physical geography Atmospheric science / Meteorology Biogeography / Phytogeography Climatology / Paleoclimatology / Palaeogeography Coastal geography / Oceanography Edaphology / Pedology or Soil science Geobiology Geology Geostatistics Glaciology Hydrology / Limnology / Hydrogeology Landscape ecology Quaternary science Geophysics Paleontology Paleobiology Paleoecology Astrobiology Astronomy Observational astronomy Gamma ray astronomy Infrared astronomy Microwave astronomy Optical astronomy Radio astronomy UV astronomy X-ray astronomy Astrophysics Gravitational astronomy Black holes Interstellar medium Numerical simulations Astrophysical plasma Galaxy formation and evolution High-energy astrophysics Hydrodynamics Magnetohydrodynamics Star formation Physical cosmology Stellar astrophysics Helioseismology Stellar evolution Stellar nucleosynthesis Planetary science Also a branch of electrical engineering Pure mathematics Applied mathematics Astrostatistics Biostatistics Academia Academic genealogy Curriculum Multidisciplinary approach Interdisciplinarity Transdisciplinarity Professions Classification of Instructional Programs Joint Academic Coding System List of fields of doctoral studies in the United States List of academic fields Abbott, Andrew.
Chaos of Disciplines. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-00101-2. Oleson, Alexandra; the Organization of knowledge in modern America, 1860-1920. ISBN 0-8018-2108-8. US Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. Classification of Instructional Programs. National Center for Education Statistics. Classification of Instructional Programs: Developed by the U. S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics to provide a taxonomic scheme that will support the accurate tracking and reporting of fields of study and program completions activity. Complete JACS from Higher Education Statistics Agency in the United Kingdom Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification Chapter 3 and Appendix 1: Fields of research classification. Fields of Knowledge, a zoomable map allowing the academic disciplines and sub-disciplines in this article be visualised. Sandoz, R. Interactive Historical Atlas of the Disciplines, University of Geneva
Binghamton University
The State University of New York at Binghamton referred to as Binghamton University and SUNY Binghamton, is a public research university with campuses in Binghamton and Johnson City, New York, United States. It is one of the four university centers in the State University of New York system; as of Fall 2018, 17,768 undergraduate and graduate students attend the university. The Vestal campus is listed as a census-designated place, with a residential population of 6,177 as of the 2010 Census. Since its establishment in 1946, the school has evolved from a small liberal arts college to a large research university, ranked among the best public universities in the United States. Binghamton University is considered to be one of the "Public Ivies," a publicly-funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League; the university is designated as an R1 Doctoral University with high research activity according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Binghamton's athletic teams are known as the Bearcats, compete in Division I of the NCAA. The Bearcats are members of the America East Conference. Binghamton University was established in 1946 in Endicott, New York, as Triple Cities College to serve the needs of local veterans returning from World War II. Thomas J. Watson, a founding member of IBM in Broome County, viewed the Triple Cities region as an area of great potential. In the early 1940s he collaborated with local leaders to begin establishing the two-year school as a satellite of private Syracuse University, donating land that would become the school's early home. Triple Cities College students finished their bachelor's degrees at Syracuse. By the 1948–1949 academic year, these could be completed at the College. In 1950, it split from Syracuse and became incorporated into the public State University of New York system as Harpur College, named in honor of Robert Harpur, a colonial teacher and pioneer who settled in the Binghamton area.
At the time it joined Champlain College in Plattsburgh as the only two liberal arts schools in the New York state system. When Champlain closed in 1952 to make way for the Plattsburgh Air Force Base, the records and some students and faculty were transferred to Harpur College in Binghamton. Harpur received 16,000 non-duplicate volumes and the complete contents of the Champlain College library. In 1955, Harpur began to plan its current location in a town near Binghamton. A site large enough to anticipate future growth was purchased, with the school's move to its new 387-acre campus being completed by 1961. Colonial Hall, Triple Cities College's original building in Endicott, stands today as the village's Visitor's Center. In 1965, Harpur College was selected to join New York state schools at Stony Brook and Buffalo as one of the four new SUNY university centers. Redesignated the State University of New York at Binghamton, the school's new name reflected its status as an advanced degree granting institution.
In a nod to tradition, its undergraduate college of arts and sciences remained "Harpur College". With more than 60% of undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in Harpur's degree programs, it is the largest of Binghamton's constituent schools. In 1967, the School of Advanced Technology was established, the precursor to the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, founded in 1983. Since 1992, the school has made an effort to distinguish itself from the SUNY system, rebranding itself as "Binghamton University," or "Binghamton University, State University of New York". Still and the State University of New York at Binghamton, its University administration procedures discourage references to the school as "SUNY—Binghamton," "SUNY—B," "Harpur College," or other names not listed above; the first president of Harpur College, who began as dean of Triple Cities College, was Glenn Bartle. The second president, G. Bruce Dearing, served several years during the Vietnam era before leaving to become vice chancellor for academic affairs at the SUNY Central Administration in Albany.
Next was C. Peter Magrath, former interim president of the University of Nebraska, who served from 1972 to 1974 left to become president at the University of Minnesota; the fourth president at Binghamton was Clifford D. Clark, who left his position as dean of the business school at the University of Kansas to serve as vice president for academic affairs at Binghamton in 1973, he was asked to take on the job of acting president in the fall of 1974, when Magrath left for Minnesota. Clark was selected as president and served from March 1975 through mid-1990. During this time he led the school's evolution from a four-year liberal arts college to a research university. Clark added the Anderson Center for the Performing Arts and inaugurated the Summer Music Festival, created the Harpur Forum, established the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, fostered the expansion and development of the Decker School of Nursing. Lois B. DeFleur became the university's fifth president upon Clark's retirement in 1990.
During her nearly 20-year tenure the University experienced its most significant growth. She oversaw substantial additions to the student and faculty populations, vastly expanded research activities and funding, formalized Binghamton's fundraising efforts, expanded the campus' physical footprint by 20 buildings, launched Binghamton's "green" efforts for which they are now nationally recognized, transitioned the school from Division III athletics to Division I and catalyzed the biggest increase in academic rankings to date. DeFleur retired in 2010 and on July 1
Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters Corporation is a Canadian multinational mass media and information firm. The firm was founded in Toronto, Canada, where it is headquartered at 333 Bay Street in Downtown Toronto. Thomson Reuters shares are cross listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corporation's purchase of the British company Reuters Group in April 2008, is majority owned by The Woodbridge Company, a holding company for the Thomson family. Thomson Reuters was ranked as Canada's "leading corporate brand" in the 2010 Interbrand Best Canadian Brands ranking. Thomson Reuters operates in more than 100 countries, has more than 45,000 employees; the company was founded by Roy Thomson in 1934 in Ontario as the publisher of The Timmins Daily Press. In 1953, Thomson moved to Scotland the following year, he consolidated his media position in Scotland in 1957 when he won the franchise for Scottish Television. In 1959, he bought the Kemsley Group, a purchase that gave him control of the Sunday Times.
He separately acquired the Times in 1967. He moved into the airline business in 1965, when he acquired Britannia Airways and into oil and gas exploration in 1971 when he participated in a consortium to exploit reserves in the North Sea. In the 1970s, following the death of Thomson, the company withdrew from national newspapers and broadcast media, selling the Times, the Sunday Times and Scottish Television and instead moved into publishing, buying Sweet & Maxwell in 1988; the company at this time was known as the International Thomson Organisation Ltd. In 1989, ITOL merged with Thomson Newspapers. In 1996, The Thomson Corporation acquired West Publishing, a purveyor of legal research and solutions including Westlaw; the Company was founded by Paul Julius Reuter in 1851 in London as a business transmitting stock market quotations. Reuter set up his "Submarine Telegraph" office in October 1851 and negotiated a contract with the London Stock Exchange to provide stock prices from the continental exchanges in return for access to London prices, which he supplied to stockbrokers in Paris, France.
In 1865, Reuters in London was the first organization to report the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The company was involved in developing the use of radio in 1923, it was acquired by the British National & Provincial Press in 1941 and first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1984. Reuters began to grow in the 1980s, widening the range of its business products and expanding its global reporting network for media and economic services: key product launches included Equities 2000, Dealing 2000-2, Business Briefing, Reuters Television for the financial markets, 3000 Series and the Reuters 3000 Xtra service; the Thomson Corporation acquired Reuters Group PLC to form Thomson Reuters on April 17, 2008. Thomson Reuters operated under a dual-listed company structure and had two parent companies, both of which were publicly listed — Thomson Reuters Corporation and Thomson Reuters PLC. In 2009, it unified its dual listed company structure and stopped its listing on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
It is now listed only as Thomson Reuters Corporation on the New York Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange. On February 13, 2013, Thomson Reuters announced it would cut 2,500 jobs to cut cost in its Legal and Risk division. On October 29, 2013, Thomson Reuters announced it would cut another 3,000 jobs in those same three divisions; the Thomson-Reuters merger transaction was reviewed by the U. S. Department of Justice and by the European Commission. On February 19, 2008, both the Department of Justice and the Commission cleared the transaction subject to minor divestments; the Department of Justice required the parties to sell copies of the data contained in the following products: Thomson's WorldScope, a global fundamentals product. The proposed settlement further requires the licensing of related intellectual property, access to personnel, transitional support to ensure that the buyer of each set of data can continue to update its database so as to continue to offer users a viable and competitive product.
The European Commission imposed similar divestments: according to the Commission's press release, "the parties committed to divest the databases containing the content sets of such financial information products, together with relevant assets and customer base as appropriate to allow purchasers of the databases and assets to establish themselves as a credible competitive force in the marketplace in competition with the merged entity, re-establishing the pre-merger rivalry in the respective fields."These remedies were viewed as minor given the scope of the transaction. According to the Financial Times, "the remedy proposed by the competition authorities will affect no more than $25m of the new Thomson Reuters group’s $13bn-plus combined revenues."The transaction was cleared by the Canadian Competition Bureau. In November 2009, The European Commission opened formal anti-trust proceedings against Thomson Reuters concerning a potential infringement of the EC Treaty's rules on abuse of a dominant market position.
The Commission investigated Thomson Reuters' practices in the area of real-time market datafeeds, in particular whether customers or competitors were prevented from translating Reuters Instrument Codes to alternative identification codes of other datafeed suppliers to the detriment of competition. In Dec
Peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competences as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs, e.g. medical peer review. Professional peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. In academia, peer review is used to inform in decisions related to faculty tenure. Henry Oldenburg was a British philosopher, seen as the'father' of modern scientific peer review. WA prototype is a professional peer-review process recommended in the Ethics of the Physician written by Ishāq ibn ʻAlī al-Ruhāwī.
He stated that a visiting physician had to make duplicate notes of a patient's condition on every visit. When the patient was cured or had died, the notes of the physician were examined by a local medical council of other physicians, who would decide whether the treatment had met the required standards of medical care. Professional peer review is common in the field of health care, where it is called clinical peer review. Further, since peer review activity is segmented by clinical discipline, there is physician peer review, nursing peer review, dentistry peer review, etc. Many other professional fields have some level of peer review process: accounting, engineering and forest fire management. Peer review is used in education to achieve certain learning objectives as a tool to reach higher order processes in the affective and cognitive domains as defined by Bloom's taxonomy; this may take a variety of forms, including mimicking the scholarly peer review processes used in science and medicine.
Scholarly peer review is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal, conference proceedings or as a book. The peer review helps the publisher decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, the significance of an idea may never be appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is considered necessary to academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals, but it by no means prevents publication of invalid research. Traditionally, peer reviewers have been anonymous, but there is a significant amount of open peer review, where the comments are visible to readers with the identities of the peer reviewers disclosed as well.
The European Union has been using peer review in the "Open Method of Co-ordination" of policies in the fields of active labour market policy since 1999. In 2004, a program of peer reviews started in social inclusion; each program sponsors about eight peer review meetings in each year, in which a "host country" lays a given policy or initiative open to examination by half a dozen other countries and the relevant European-level NGOs. These meet over two days and include visits to local sites where the policy can be seen in operation; the meeting is preceded by the compilation of an expert report on which participating "peer countries" submit comments. The results are published on the web; the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, through UNECE Environmental Performance Reviews, uses peer review, referred to as "peer learning", to evaluate progress made by its member countries in improving their environmental policies. The State of California is the only U. S. state to mandate scientific peer review.
In 1997, the Governor of California signed into law Senate Bill 1320, Chapter 295, statutes of 1997, which mandates that, before any CalEPA Board, Department, or Office adopts a final version of a rule-making, the scientific findings and assumptions on which the proposed rule are based must be submitted for independent external scientific peer review. This requirement is incorporated into the California Health and Safety Code Section 57004. Medical peer review may be distinguished in 4 classifications: 1) clinical peer review. Additionally, "medical peer review" has been used by the American Medical Association to refer not only to the process of improving quality and safety in health care organizations, but to the process of rating clinical behavior or compliance with professional society membership standards. Thus, the terminology has poor standardization and specificity as a database search term. To an outsider, the anonymous, pre-publication peer review process is opaque. Certain journals are accused of not carrying out stringent peer review in order to more expand their customer base in journals where authors pay a fee before public
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