Foucault, the “Facts,” and the Fiction of Neutrality: Neutrality in Librarianship and Peer Review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper brings together two discourses in librarianship, that of neutrality in the context of library services, and that of peer review, which is of concern for librarianship as it moves more into the realm of scholarly communication. It points out the shortcomings of this ethical principle within the context of library services, using LIS literature on the opposition between neutrality and the commitment to social justice. It also uses Foucault’s theories on discipline, and knowledge and power, and Latour and Woolgar’s analysis of the construction of scientific facts, to critique the concept of neutrality. Then it asks how that critique applies to the practice of peer review, in which the expectation is that reviewers will be neutral or impartial judges of manuscripts. Findings suggest that the principle of neutrality, with a slightly different meaning in this context, does have useful applications to peer review, ensuring fairness. Although neutrality may never be possible completely, cross-disciplinary literature suggests ways to limit the effects of bias. Thus, librarians can better understand the different meanings of neutrality in these different contexts, including its usefulness and limitations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it