At Genomes Unzipped: Personal Public Genomics, Joe Pickrell starts another round of “What’s wrong with peer review,” raising the stakes: He asks, “Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals?” (13/07/2011), arguing
In this post, I will argue that cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing, and that the only thing keeping this from happening is the absence of a “killer app”.
For one thing,
So let’s take this goal–that of filtering papers based on quality, interest to a community, and reproducibility–as the legitimate service provided by peer-reviewed journals. When phrased like this, it’s simply absurd that our way of achieving this goal involves a handful of unaccountable, often anonymous, reviewers and editors, and takes so much time and money. Certainly the best judge of the interest of a paper to the community is, well, the community itself. Ditto for the best judge of the quality and reproducibility of a paper. So let’s imagine a different system. What features would this system have?
More.
Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista