alternatives to peer review_05

Alternatives to peer review

For those interested in the process of peer review, take a look at

this interesting article.

For those not familiar with the concept of "peer review," here's a

short explanation. Scientific journals will not publish a paper until

it has been critically scrutinized by other scientists (usually two or

three) who are experts on its subject. In this process, called peer

review, the reviewers' job is to look for any errors or weaknesses -

in data used, calculations, experimental methods, or interpretation of

results - that might cast doubt on the conclusions of the paper. The

process is usually anonymous, so reviewers are free to give their

honest professional opinion without fear of embarrassment or

retribution.

Peer review is one of the cornerstones of modern science. And

succeeding at peer review counts for everything in a scientific

career. For scientific work to attract attention and respect, it has

to be published in peer-reviewed journals. Proposals for research

funding must also go through peer review. For scientists to get and

keep jobs and achieve all other forms of professional reward and

status, they must succeed at getting their work through peer review.

Because of its central place in science, I'm quite skeptical that

non-peer-reviewed journals will be successful. It seems like likely

that non-peer-reviewed journal publications will simply not count the

same as peer-reviewed publications for things that matter, like tenure

decisions, and that people will not publish first-rate work there.

Rather, it will be second-rate work that has been rejected from

peer-reviewed journals that will end up in the non-peer-reviewed

literature.

One of the complaints against peer review is that good science is

sometimes held up or even rejected by stubborn or biased reviewers,

thus hurting both the authors and the scientific community. My

experience is that this is rarely a real problem: if your paper gets

rejected by one journal, you can always submit it to another. And an

author can always request that a particular person (or two) not serve

as peer reviewer. If a paper gets rejected by several groups of

reviewers picked by several journals, then it probably doesn't deserve

to be published anywhere.

In addition, implementing a non-peer-reviewed journal simply trades

one problem for another. While legitimate science might sometimes be

delayed or rejected by peer review, a lot of really bad science is

correctly filtered by peer review. By eliminating peer review, you

will unleash all of the bad science on the community. This seems to me

to be a bad idea.

In any event, it looks like the experiment is going to be run, so