The Rise and Fall of Peer Review

There seems to be an open debate on whether the current system of peer-review actually weeds out papers correctly. This experiment re-submitted 12 already approved papers and 89% of the peer reviewers said the paper shouldn’t be published. More recently hundreds of sham papers managed to get through the process as scammers posed as guest editors.

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.

Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant.

This suggests that a problem may be tackled effectively not my commissioning more research, but by assuming most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals,... See more

The world of science was open before us to a degree that has become inconceivable now, when pages and pages of application papers must justify the plan of investigating, “in depth,” the thirty-fifth foot of the centipede; and one is judged by a jury of one’s peers who are all centipedists or molecular podiatrists. I would say that most of the great... See more

Simultaneously, we are facing a technological revolution the consequences of which we are only beginning dimly to grasp, let alone understand. The evidence seems to be growing that this revolution – which is more accurately a revolution in how information is generated, collected, processed, analyzed, shared, consumed, and understood – may be fundam... See more