Information Quality and Evidence Law: A New Role for Social Media, Digital Publishing and Copyright Law?

Abstract

Increasingly, judges are asked to act as gatekeepers between law and science, using the rules of admissibility to perform what could be understood as a form of “secondary forensic information quality assurance”. To exercise their gate keeping function and to ensure that the jury is only exposed to the “best evidence (possible)”, judges rely on other primary gatekeepers, amongst them forensic regulators, scientific communities and academic publishers. This paper addresses how digital media and new forms of publishing are changing the nature of these gatekeepers, focusing in particular on how they change the role of peer review as a major quality assurance mechanism used by the courts at present. Data mining social media also provides us with both quantitatively and qualitatively new information about scientists, scientific communities and the practice of science. This paper argues that the discourse on information quality can be one avenue to make more systematic use of these data, helping to address long-known shortcomings in the justice system.