On 3 June 2024, the Centre hosted the epistemologist and philosopher of science PD Dr. Nicola Mößner, who, under the heading “Problems of scientific practice: Electronic Publishing and the Evaluation of Philosophical Expertise”, laid out a problem area that not only interests her theoretically as a subject of her research, but – as a working philosopher – also concerns her practically: that of electronic publishing and the evaluation of philosophical expertise.

In her presentation, Mößner showed how the structural change in academic publishing – where ever fewer, ever larger publishers increasingly position themselves not as mere publishers but as information service providers and analysts – not only leads to an unequal distribution of workload and profits, but also undermines trust in academic expertise and threatens to undercut the autonomy of the sciences. Following this diagnosis, she presented for discussion five ‘Recommendations for strengthening the autonomy of the sciences’, which were developed as part of the conference ‘verTRACKTe Infrastruktur?!’ organised by the German Philosophical Society in September 2023. In addition to various possibilities for tying academic publishing infrastructure more closely to universities and thus the scientific community, it was particularly the difficulties of evaluating expertise in the humanities using metadata analysis and peer review procedures as well as the sensible design of supervision and evaluation relationships that were heavily, but ever constructively, debated among the attendees.

PD Dr. Nicola Mößner currently serves as interim professor at the Institute of Philosophy at Leibniz University Hannover. She works primarily on topics of general philosophy of science, social epistemology, picture theory and media philosophy.