An exciting recent development is community peer review, also called “open peer review.” Under this system, preprints are uploaded to a server, wherein a pool of reviewers can look them over and decide which, if any, they would like to review. Articles that have made it out of this pool are then selected for publication. This differs from the “upload PDFs to the internet” ideas because it is more structured, results in a definitive outcome, and allows gatekeeping in terms of the composition of the pool of reviewers.
That… seems like a weird framing of what is going on? Community peer-review was the standard before anonymous and random peer review ended up being forced on the scientific institution, the way this article describes. Post-publication community peer review was the standard in most fields until the mid of the 20th century, and describing it as an exciting recent development feels like it’s conceding the whole debate.
Yes, just do post-publication peer review. Let journals and authors curate which papers they think are good at the same time as everyone else gets to read them. That’s what science did before various large government funding bodies demanded more objectivity in the process (with, as this article and other articles it links to, great harm to the process of science).
That… seems like a weird framing of what is going on? Community peer-review was the standard before anonymous and random peer review ended up being forced on the scientific institution, the way this article describes. Post-publication community peer review was the standard in most fields until the mid of the 20th century, and describing it as an exciting recent development feels like it’s conceding the whole debate.
Yes, just do post-publication peer review. Let journals and authors curate which papers they think are good at the same time as everyone else gets to read them. That’s what science did before various large government funding bodies demanded more objectivity in the process (with, as this article and other articles it links to, great harm to the process of science).