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Speaking as a former scientist, it's worth remembering that peer review is not just about ensuring quality by preventing poor research being published. It also
by JR1427 3y ago
Speaking as a former scientist, it's worth remembering that peer review is not just about ensuring quality by preventing poor research being published. It also leads to good research being improved, in a very similar way to how code review can improve good code.
So doing away with peer review would have some negative consequences.
It's also worth remembering that journals are really not very different to newspapers, and the top journals are the tabloids. They want to publish things that people will read and cite. They only care about quality in so far as it is required for people to want to read a paper. Ever wandered why so many top journal papers get retracted? It's because the top journals know people will read the click-bait! My favourite example is when the Lancet published the famous MMR-Autism paper by Wakefield, which is terribly unscientific, but was bound to be much cited.
- markhahn 3y agomore-open publishing does not necessarily do away with peer review. the really interesting part is that sometimes review benefits from anonymity and even blinding. doing that in a more-public publishing process would be interesting. (but not impossible - there are tricks to providing authentic anonymous identities.)
- 317070 3y ago> It also leads to good research being improved, in a very similar way to how code review can improve good code. But the parallel breaks, as unlike with code reviews, there is no protection against (and the people below are real people I have encountered in my 10+ year research experience): * A reviewer writing eloquent reviews on every single paper they ever reviewed, explaining why they should be rejected, as a gimmick at this point. * Reviewers not taking time constraints into consideration. Doing this 2 year experiment would indeed make for a better paper. * Reviewers not reviewing in a timely manner. Yes, you said you volunteered to review this. It has been 9 months since. * Reviewers requesting you to cite their papers, however unrelated. * I quote a full review I once had: "This paper needs more equations." When code reviewing in a team, these issues get sorted out. In academia, peer reviewing is in a state of complete anarchy.
- JR1427 3y agoI agree, those are all existing problems. But I would say the don't detract from the benefits. Maybe peer review should be time limited, but have the reviewers comments be immediately available for the authors to respond to, rather than having to wait for them all to come in.