Neutron Bomb

If all academic papers move to free e-journals the question arises as to what, if any, degree of peer review should remain.

It’s a vexed issue.

A blog such as this one can introduce any number of genuinely new concepts and yet it has not had the ‘pushback’ that a peer review process engenders.

This pushback is designed to make the work more rigorous, more cognizant of prior efforts, and structured in a standard manner.

This is, at one level, good for the author by making him/her more productive within the structure of academia.

However, in the internet era the good stuff seems to simply ‘float’ to the top and it doesn’t need pre-publication peer review.

The good stuff is subject to a post-publication plebiscite. I suspect this is ‘same-same’ when all is said and done.

And whether it’s a good thing or not I predict that peer review will go the same way as horses did in transport.

Of course there will be a rear-guard action by the academic authorities but they simply will not be able to stop the younger academics publishing outside the peer reviewed e-journal system. And the feedback and love they get here will overwhelm their egos.

In fact it has already started – there are plenty of http references to non-peer review articles in peer reviewed papers. This is the thin edge of the wedge!

When academic papers become sans-peer review let’s hope the sheer quantity overcomes the overall drop in quality.

In the meantime possibly we should ‘fix’ all that is broken about peer review. It’s just so random, opaque & subject to abuse (as a process) that it’s asking to be shot.