2 ms·

> Absolute crap will be roundly ignored with or without peer review. Things might be ignored, but only after a person has already wasted their time looking at

> Absolute crap will be roundly ignored with or without peer review. Things might be ignored, but only after a person has already wasted their time looking at it and determining it is crap. It was harder for cranks to publish back when journals were purely physical and a crank would have to come up with the printing costs himself. Now that anyone can publish for free on the internet, peer review is even more important for establishing what content out there is worth paying attention to and which is not.

barry-cotter 9y ago
You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors. Even if we assume that all involved are pure of heart and no one is deliberately delaying publication of their rivals’ work submission to publication in economics is on the order of two years. This is insane so the actual intellectual conversation has moved to working papers with final publication being in a journal being as much for archival and career progression metrics as anything else. I believe the situation in much of computer science is similar, with conference papers serving as the workaround for the fact that pre publication peer review is unbearably slow, not working papers. Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit. Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors. I neglect those because journals in my own field are both free to publish in and, more often than not, open-access. I do understand that not everyone is so fortunate, however.
  - barry-cotter 9y ago
    I’m talking about time, not money. Because those costs absolutely are borne by the authors. Insofar as peer review hinders the free dissemination of ideas it also hurts the scientific community and those who depend on its research.

barry-cotter 9y ago

You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors. Even if we assume that all involved are pure of heart and no one is deliberately delaying publication of their rivals’ work submission to publication in economics is on the order of two years. This is insane so the actual intellectual conversation has moved to working papers with final publication being in a journal being as much for archival and career progression metrics as anything else. I believe the situation in much of computer science is similar, with conference papers serving as the workaround for the fact that pre publication peer review is unbearably slow, not working papers. Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit. Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?

Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors. I neglect those because journals in my own field are both free to publish in and, more often than not, open-access. I do understand that not everyone is so fortunate, however.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  I’m talking about time, not money. Because those costs absolutely are borne by the authors. Insofar as peer review hinders the free dissemination of ideas it also hurts the scientific community and those who depend on its research.