Part 1: https://mander.xyz/post/13579080
No, they can’t. Peer review is not the peers you determine - it’s the peers of your community. Science that is not public is not science, because it cannot be independently verified and reproduced. It is not a small point, it’s one of the foundations of the disciplines of science.
An organisation with fully independent teams tackling the same problems can absolutely be defined as peer review. Not in the traditional sense, but reviewing, confirming and replicating nonetheless. Following the scientific method is what makes something scientific, not the act of publishing.
You can argue of the merits of those papers, an organisation can never make public statements about private research. But saying that what their doing is not science, then you’re just needlessly gatekeeping.
No it literally cannot be so defined. The last part of the scientific method is “report conclusions.” That means public scrutiny free of bias. Internal groups are not public.
This is akin to saying that a corporation doesn’t need to use the courts because it has internal judges. They might have trials, but by definition they are not doing justice.
Reporting your conclusions doesn’t require being public. It means the larger group of people you release it to, the less bias you’ll have. Meaning in a closed organisation you have added biases of companies and marginally less people to prove you wrong, decreasing the overal quality of the conducted science. But still science, which by definition isn’t black and white.
