Let me begin by saying I have been involved in various forms of peer review for almost fifty years. It is a cumbersome, inefficient, and often ineffective process. It is ego driven and does not stop truly bad results, just look at the wealth of academic fraud. In the time of Einstein, there was a community which for the most part knew each other and the reviewer was known to the person who submitted the document.
Look at Watson and Crick, the paper was published in weeks. Look at today, and articles have dozens of authors, all seeking credit, and reviewers no really being able to vet out the facts in any of the papers and generally looking for the name of some credible author so that they can pass on the paper by saying Prof so and so was an author. In fact that is the way these papers are now put together, some student writes it, so junior faculty tags their name to it and that person may get a senior faculty member on the paper as well.
Thus the process of peer review in my opinion as currently handled has become ineffective and frankly counter productive.
Now with the Internet there is a way to post a proposed paper and have real time dynamic review, but one must be careful.
My suggestions are as follows:
1. All reviewers must use their real names. They should not be anonymous, they should put their reputations on the line as much as the author does. Thus the posting of draft paper on the Internet today invite comments. Comments from known entities are well accepted even if highly critical. Comments from some unknown commentator who calls themselves "INOITALL" and the like are a waste. The problem with the Internet etiquette is the fact that one can be a total unknown. That may also have been the problem with anonymous peer reviews. Only the editor knew. In anonymous Internet reviews, no one knows.
2. Draft papers can be submitted since work in progress has value and it establishes precedent if done correctly. Here we have an interesting issue. The Internet allows for the posting of drafts, and drafts have certain qualities. First they get out early. Second they show how the thought process has progresses. I think this is often more important than the result. Third it gets the results out earlier and gets a conversation started. However it may attract some of the less ethical to steal ideas. Yet one need only read the Watson book and the dealing with the Pauling efforts on DNA, that was a rush and Watson and Crick did whatever to beat Pauling.
3. Finalized papers, namely ones to be deemed "published" can also have the trail of comments and corrections. That is often invaluable. he changes and corrections would have to be tagged with who contributed it. The dialog between reviewer and author would become also invaluable. The resulting Wiki like dialogues would be as much a part of the publication as the paper itself. In effect the journal would be like a Wiki, the final paper, the tagged discussion, and links to older docs.
4. This would be workable for papers and books as well. I know that many authors want the hard copy but with e books exploding and the need to have an electronic copy, this would be an attractive alternative. E publishers get the books out cheaply and in shorter time. The problem I see here is that I have never really found reviews useful yet I could not live without an editor. Editors correct many of the personal quirks in one's writing and a good book like a good writer is often dependent upon a great editor! How that works is an interesting challenge. Then there is the compensation issues, well I never got rich on my prior books, but as an academic that was not the purpose. For those academics with their 15th editions of introductory economics or whatever who have made a fortune cornering a market, well I would guess there could be alternatives. My suggestion here is for the truly academic publishing business.
What I find interesting is that when one uses the Internet to post working papers, if some anonymous critic does not like your position in a working paper they make a comment like "well this was not peer reviewed". Well if these unknown critics were to send an email with their concerns a dialog would result. I have often found that authors whose books I have read and commented upon will respond, they like it, as I do myself.
The worst thing in the Internet world as well in the peer review world has been the anonymous nature of the review process. If one must post their identify on a paper then one should post their identity on a review.
Thus this finally leads to the question of how will this change publishing papers and books. I believe that for papers there will be an all electronic world shortly. All my current journals I access in electronic form only. My medical journals sit on a coffee table and they arrive solely because they have drug ads in them. I never read a hard copy of the paper. The same is the case with the more classic journals which I get just electronically. Why not converts the entire process to an all electronic process. From submission to publication.
The Times states:
That transformation was behind the recent decision by the prestigious 60-year-old Shakespeare Quarterly to embark on an uncharacteristic experiment in the forthcoming fall issue — one that will make it, Ms. Rowe says, the first traditional humanities journal to open its reviewing to the World Wide Web.
Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts — what Ms. Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.
The Quarterly trial, along with a handful of other trailblazing digital experiments, goes to the very nature of the scholarly enterprise. Traditional peer review has shaped the way new research has been screened for quality and then how it is communicated; it has defined the border between the public and an exclusive group of specialized experts.
I believe that mixed will also go by the wayside. There should be standards, there should be editors of some degree, but they should be minimal as gatekeepers.
The Times does emphasize my point as follows:
Each type of review has benefits and drawbacks...The traditional method, in which independent experts evaluate a submission, often under a veil of anonymity, can take months, even years.
And as I stated above the process seems to work well with working papers in many fields:
In some respects scientists and economists who have created online repositories for unpublished working papers ... have more quickly adapted to digital life. Just this month, mathematicians used blogs and wikis to evaluate a supposed mathematical proof in the space of a week — the scholarly equivalent of warp speed.
The article ends with:
To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”
This statement begs the question, where is the wall of the Academy in the Internet age. One need not be part of some walled edifice to publish. One may have ideas of merit and one may then more readily share those ideas with others. Did Einstein need the walls of a University in 1905 when he did his most creative papers, no he was still at the patent office. The often chilling arrogance of the Academy can be broken down, and a mass of ideas can flow much more readily.
As a final comment, this potential change can also be a globalizing mechanism as well. The walls of the Academy will no longer be limiting.
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