Monday, October 02, 2006

New peer-review concept

Wired has printed an AP story on new peer-reviewing publishing systems in the science community. In a way, I am surprised that these ideas haven't been tried before. There are many social networking sites that work in a similar way (I am thinking about Digg). But I wonder, do scientists have lots of free time to be doing free-lance review work?

1 comment:

Barbara said...

Interesting. I suppose, in a way, it has been tried - arXiv is an open-source site that has been around for years as an alternative of sorts to the slower peer-review process, and it is where recently the winner of the Fields Medal published his proof of a long-standing mathematical puzzle (an honor he refused). So while not peer-reviewed, it's respected by peers. Nature has been exploring the frontiers of peer review. I think it's evolving into some new areas, but I'm not sure why, if the authors and the reviewers are not paid, it still should be so expensive to play. I'm somewhat puzzled by the PLoS model.

By the way, sorry for such a long silence - I was overwhelmed with instruction requests in September. Much as I love teaching, I find it absorbs all my time at certain points of the year. I hope to post more frequently now that the first rush is over. Whew!