Peer review
Well, speaking for myself... I think official peer review in science
is broken. I like
the idea in principle, though. It's usually capable of rejecting
obviously incompetent papers, but usually not capable of anything
deeper, such as actually detecting errors that involve the referee
seriously comprehending the paper. This is unfortunate, but it is my
experience. I think good referees are rare nowadays. It was a system
designed for amateurs that worked pretty well 100 years ago when
science was small and, e.g. all
quantum physicists fit in 1 room. Mainly it involves the refs being
anonymous unpaid and unaccountable but the authors being non-anonymous
and paying, and ref-author interactions not done interactively... all
exactly the opposite of how it should be.
Also, it is unbelievably inefficient, often taking years.
In my case, with my voting-related work, I find if I publish on the web,
then (1) it gets published immediately, (2) it gets peer review in the sense
of people emailing me comments, questions, corrections, redoing my work,
etc to a far greater total extent than any official peer review I ever had,
(3) it gets vastly more readership than any official
scientific journal publication I ever had. Indeed, my web site gets
comparable readership to the best selling books Harvard University
Press ever published.
Also, I did submit several of my voting related works, including an
entire book I wrote, to official publishers, and so far it all has
been rejected. Amazingly though, I do not think those rejecting it
pointed out even a single specific error. If I kept fighting for
years I probably could have got it published, but I do not have the
stomach for that.
I like the idea that journals are archival, but many are now giving
even that up, becoming all-electronic.
My faith was shaken yet more by this -- here's a paper I wrote and in
fact am still working on (consider it partially finished) --
http://rangevoting.org/CombinedTestFail.html
and you probably do not want to read the math, but if you skip to the
part where I discuss the work of Ioannidis 2005, he claimed that
"most published research findings are false."
Wow! And it looks like he's probably right. What a massive failure
of The Official System. My god.
Here's a suggestion if you want peer review. The "arXiv" is largely
taking over science right now.
http://arxiv.org/
It's a big repository of online scientific papers. Instant publish,
instant access,
no refereeing at all. But a lot of these papers are then re-submitted
to official on-paper journals, for peer review and reprinting on
paper, often years later. I certainly now read the vast majority of
what I read, on the arXiv, only going to paper journals if I cannot
find it online, and it is harder and harder for me to get ahold of the
stuff that is on paper but not online, about half the time I cannot.
So, the arXiv is great. However, it would be better, if the arXiv
added rating and commenting facilities. If they were added, then
everything would be effectively peer reviewed, and would in total get
VASTLY more peer reviewing
than official referees of official journals provide, and in PUBLIC
(unlike those official reports which are almost always kept
secret,which is crazy). And the top most interested readers in the
world would provide this, not some schmuck who often is not even
interested.
But, it has been many years, and I know I have begged those behind the
arXiv to add this, and they refused. Which leads me to my question.
If the scientific community is
supposedly all for peer review, then how come they for years and years
still refuse to add what would be far greater peer review than ever
before available, to the greatest
sci-paper resource ever (the arXiv)????
And I believe the answer, sadly, is that the scientific community is
not actually interested in peer review for the right reasons that make
Review an inherently good idea. They really want peer review for
the reasons it is a bad idea -- to keep an unaccountable "old boys
club" in power.
If the scientific community really wishes to have good peer review,
and really wants to democratize science, then do it on the arXiv by
adding rating and commenting.
And you, as an activist, can try to add your voice to those saying so. Or try.
I think/hope this will eventually happen, but it will sure be a
tremendous waste if it
takes 100 years.
--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)