Comments on: When is Peer Review the Gold Standard, and When is it Only Tin?

By: Slow blogging…it must be article time « Picking Up Sticks

Slow blogging…it must be article time « Picking Up Sticks — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:53:06 +0000

[...] in the journal associated with the conference. So that’s where my paper is now – the shadowy world of peer review. I think the organisers have struck gold with virtual participation, especially for a [...]

By: Bookmarks about Ethnography

Bookmarks about Ethnography — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:45:17 +0000

[...] – bookmarked by 3 members originally found by beahgo on 2008-08-14 When is Peer Review the Gold Standard, and When is it Only Tin? http://www.ethnography.com/2008/07/when-is-peer-review-the-gold-standard-and-when-is-it-only-tin/ [...]

By: LFB

LFB — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:36:36 +0000

“…we would do better by publishing (almost) everything and letting the scholarly community decide.”

I don’t have time to wade through the huge amount of crap that this method entails, and therefore would continue to rely on peer-reviewed journals. Publishing via your suggested method and having my stuff sit alongside absolutely anything also means there will be no prestige and, ergo, no tenure for me.

By: w

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:33:57 +0000

check out http://arxiv.org, the canonical pre-print server for physics. I think it is worth considering what abandoning peer review has revolutionized scholarly communication in physics and some related disciplines. TOday, the real innovations get posted to arxiv, there is a public discussion among peers (go figure) through counter papers also submitted to arxiv, and then the articles get sent to the peer reviewed journals as an afterthought after all the real intellectual work happened on arxiv and through email. There isn’t much problem with goofballs, since everyone knows everyone in the community and there is a gatekeeper to screen the complete nutjobs.

(The idea is that you would recognize the difference between Kant and Joe-at-the-Bar without a peer reviewer telling you first interesting experiment…)

I think a problem is that free / internet journals try to duplicate the peer review process when we would do better by publishing (almost) everything and letting the scholarly community decide.