I wrote about it at the beginning of the summer in The Problem with Pre-Publication Peer Review. The real question now is how do we go from a pre-publication model to a post publication model. Why ? Because quite simply we need to:
- Make the process fairer than is currently implemented
- Provide insight to the community through public reviews (please note I didn't say the reviewer had to provide her/his identity, we just need the review to be public nothing else).
If you want to be part of that conversation, please come by this Google plus thread started by Pierre Vandergheynst. If you cannot make it to Google Plus, you can always comment here, I'll paste your comment on that thread.
Additional reference you mght be interested in reading: Micheal Eisen's Peer review is f***ed up – let’s fix it
and The Glacial Pace of Change in Scientific Publishing.. All the Nuit Blanche entries on the subject can be found here under the tag publishing.
Let's take an example, Eric Tramel pointed out this site http://arxaliv.org/, what is stopping me or you to put comments here on this paper ?
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2 comments:
Hi Igor,
I too have suffered in the past under the present system, specifically with submissions to the IEEE Transactions. I would also emphasize the need for reviews to be as constructive as possible so as to serve a teaching function for those who are new to the research profession or to the process of publication.
Sorry, Igor, this issue pales in comparison to peer review of grants, which prevents innovative research from occurring in the first place. Peer review of journals is a much less important issue, because there are so many journals to choose from, and if you don't like any of them, you can start your own, or, nowadays, self-publish on the internet. We have achieved this state:
Gordon, R. & B.J. Poulin (2008). There is but one journal: the scientific literature. PLoS Medicine 5(10), e201.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/annotation/listThread.action?root=16331
Regarding grants, the situation is summarized in:
Gordon, R. & B.J. Poulin (2009). Cost of the NSERC science grant peer review system exceeds the cost of giving every qualified researcher a baseline grant. Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance 16(1), 1-28.
Yours, -Dick Gordon DickGordonCan@gmail.com
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