Anxious not to let the momentum dissipate about the discussion of scientific publishing, I thought I’d try a quick poll to see what people think about the issue of peer review. In my earlier posts I’ve advanced the view that, at least in the subject I work in (astrophysics), peer review achieves very little. Given that it is also extremely expensive when done by traditional journals, I think it could be replaced by a kind of crowd-sourcing, in which papers are put on an open-access archive or repository of some sort, and can then be commented upon by the community and from where they can be cited by other researchers. If you like, a sort of “arXiv plus”. Good papers will attract attention, poor ones will disappear. Such a system also has the advantage of guaranteeing open public access to research papers (although not necessarily to submission, which would have to be restricted to registered users only).
However, this is all just my view and I have no idea really how strongly others rate the current system of peer review. The following poll is not very scientific, but ‘ve tried to include a reasonably representative range of views from “everything’s OK – let’s keep the current system” to the radical suggestion I make above.
Of course, if you have other views about peer review or academic publishing generally, please feel free to post them through the comments box.
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