4 ms·

They are not about peer review, if by "peer review" you mean the abstract notion of someone reviewing your work. But peer review is a specific mechanism of get

by chr1 7y ago

They are not about peer review, if by "peer review" you mean the abstract notion of someone reviewing your work. But peer review is a specific mechanism of getting comments about your work. And unfortunately it is a mechanism that has not been updated after invention of computers, so it is very inefficient at its job. Peer review in 21st century should be as easy and as open, as reviewing pull requests on github.

ISL 7y ago
The comments are secondary. Filtering for error and importance are the primary goals of peer-review.
- chr1 7y ago
  How does one "Filter for error and importance" without writing comments? I have been peer reviewer multiple times, and always had to write comments either to author pointing out errors and asking for clarifications or to the journal explaining why the paper is hopeless. It was not much different from reviewing pull requests by email. Did you have different experience reviewing papers for scientific journals?
  - ISL 7y ago
    For sure there are comments required to justify the decision/revisions. I was replying to the idea that one might submit an article for peer-review in order to get comments on one's work from the peer-review process, rather than to attempt to get it into a journal where it might be read by many people.
chr1 7y ago
I am genuinely curious why these comments criticizing the current process of peer review and publishing are being downvoted. In my ten years of working in academia i have not met anyone who was happy with the current state of things. So i would be very interested to know are there so many scientist on hn who are happy with peer review process, are there many programmers who want to protect science, or are these comments terrible in some other way to deserve downvotes.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Ar-Curunir 7y ago
  It’s not that peer review is great (there’s lot of problems with it), but rather the fact that the points you brought up have nothing to do with peer review. Anyway, I agree that academia, and science in academia in particular, has lots of problems

by chr1 7y ago

ISL 7y ago

The comments are secondary. Filtering for error and importance are the primary goals of peer-review.

chr1 7y ago
How does one "Filter for error and importance" without writing comments? I have been peer reviewer multiple times, and always had to write comments either to author pointing out errors and asking for clarifications or to the journal explaining why the paper is hopeless. It was not much different from reviewing pull requests by email. Did you have different experience reviewing papers for scientific journals?
- ISL 7y ago
  For sure there are comments required to justify the decision/revisions. I was replying to the idea that one might submit an article for peer-review in order to get comments on one's work from the peer-review process, rather than to attempt to get it into a journal where it might be read by many people.

chr1 7y ago

I am genuinely curious why these comments criticizing the current process of peer review and publishing are being downvoted. In my ten years of working in academia i have not met anyone who was happy with the current state of things. So i would be very interested to know are there so many scientist on hn who are happy with peer review process, are there many programmers who want to protect science, or are these comments terrible in some other way to deserve downvotes.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Ar-Curunir 7y ago
It’s not that peer review is great (there’s lot of problems with it), but rather the fact that the points you brought up have nothing to do with peer review. Anyway, I agree that academia, and science in academia in particular, has lots of problems