![]() Without peer review, lower quality research would get published and we (neither scientists nor the general public) won't know what to believe. But if you take peer review away, then there will be no critical analyses of research provided by the scientific community save on a voluntary basis, which would therefore be both biased and rare (as observed in PLoS One) - even with peer review being the norm, journals have a hard time finding referees. I'm not arguing that the peer review process is perfect - even now there is plenty of poorly done research that gets published. I would argue that the abundance of literature and the ease with which it can be published makes peer review even MORE necessary - without it, agenda-pushing and biased studies would become even more prevalent than they already are. Science is too diverse and too dynamic for all of us to be able to discern whether research coming from a different subfield is of sufficient quality for us to take it seriously. I'm happy to see that even the editors of journals don't claim that they're knowledgeable enough to make these decisions. This isn't something that can be replaced by a 'Like' button open to everyone in the world. Peer review is carried out by experts in the article's field of study who evaluate whether the best possible methods have been used, whether the data and statistical analysis are of high quality, whether the proper controls have been used, and whether the conclusions are valid. ![]() The point of the peer review process is not only to determine what research is interesting, but what research is scientifically valid. It's not perfect, but by and large it works - and spreads the cost widely to the point of being negligible for individual contributors.įor me what's particularly interesting is the fact that peer review is unnecessary for the same reason that copyright and patents are unnecessary nowadays: because the Internet liberates creativity massively and provides a means for bringing that flood to a wider audience without the need for official gatekeepers to bless and control it. ![]() Now the problem is dealing with the fruits of that publishing abundance - making such that people can find the really important and interesting results among the many out there.īut that doesn't require peer review of the kind currently employed: there are all kinds of systems that allow any scientist - or even the general public - to rate content and to vote it up towards a wider audience. There is little danger that important papers won't see the light of day: the nearly costless publishing medium of the Internet has seen to that. Peer review was worth the cost of people's time because opportunities to publish were rare and valuable and needed husbanding carefully. The thought I had listening to Neylon talk about peer review is that it is yet another case of a system that was originally founded to cope with scarcity - in this case of outlets for academic papers. Whatever the figure, it is significant, which brings us on to the inevitable questions: why are researchers making this donation to publishers, and do they need to? It puts the worldwide unpaid cost of peer review at £1.9 billion a year, and estimates that the UK is among the most altruistic of nations, racking up the equivalent in unpaid time of £165 million a year. Indeed, an earlier estimate put the figure even higher:Ī new report has attempted to quantify in cash terms exactly what peer reviewers are missing out on. But an alternative view is that academics (and ultimately taxpayers) are subsidising the academic publishing to the tune of £200 million a year. And it's fine if one views it as generating public good - this is what researchers need to do in order to conduct proper research. This isn't a large sum when set against things like the budget deficit, but it's not inconsiderable. ![]() ![]() So that's over £200million a year that academics are donating of their time to the peer review process. Talking with him about the formal peer review process typically employed by academic journals helped crystallise something that I have been trying to articulate: why peer review should go.Ī recent blog post has drawn some attention to the cost - to academics - of running the peer review process: Recently, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Cameron Neylon, probably the leading - and certainly most articulate - exponent of open science. ![]()
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