Sul detto comune: il sapere è pubblico in teoria, ma privato nella pratica

How is it possible, in the communication of science, to accommodate sharing with selection? Open access publishing gives us the opportunity to try new peer review styles, as for instance open peer review and retroactive peer review. How can they be as accurate as traditional, ex ante peer review? The latter relied on a secret trial and on few specialized judges; the former depends on a public trial and on many unspecialized judges that may stumble upon a text by accident. In the ancient Athens, the people's court used to be composed by jurors selected by lot: but such a court worked well because the large numbers of judges made them impossible to bribe and to intimidate them. The court of Athens model can be applied well when we have to deal with disciplinary fields that have weak, multifaceted paradigms. In such cases, a strong judge might become a tyrant, because he would not be restrained by a strong law, and it would be safer to have many weak judges, whose strength would by only in the number