Real peer review has never been tried - Works in Progress

For most of the twentieth century, science looked very different from the way it does today. For one, the internet did not exist. If researchers wanted to share their work with one another, they would meet in person – at conferences and seminars – or circulate their work through print – in letters, books, or journals.

The possibilities are vast and unpredictable because the ways that we produce science and share it are evolving too. The best tools and incentives to review science are waiting to be discovered, created and adapted – and by investing in new teams and institutions, it’s time to set the scene to build them.

Journals rely on subsidies and subscriptions from institutional libraries, which pay enormous and growing costs to access articles. People outside of large institutions, without library subscriptions, are largely shut out from reading publicly funded academic research as well as reading the comments that reviewers have made on a paper. And despite ... See more

We live in a very different world today than we did when journals were circulated through print: One with the Internet, where data and research don’t need to be circulated in limited and expensive publications. Research can be shared almost immediately with massive networks of scientists through blogs, preprints [1] , data storage platforms and onl... See more

Whether we like it or not, research is already, easily and increasingly, published outside of journals, and so are reviews. Reforming peer review, therefore, should mean working with the way science is shared in public, not ignoring it.

Unlike in book and magazine publishing, scientists who publish in journals remain unpaid by publishers for their work. Instead, academic papers are part of the research output that universities and research funders look at when allocating funding and promotions. On the other side of the equation, journals profit from their reputation – in filtering... See more

The first is that not every piece of research needs to fit the format of an academic paper to be useful to the world. Research can be of high quality while being highly incremental, part of a larger series of work, or done with a standardized pipeline (like the sequencing of a genome) that doesn’t require the typical format of ‘abstract – introduct... See more