Peer Review Problems

The review process is broken.Reviewing pre print papers isnt any more effective than reviewing printed papers. Review, and publication is a meaningless bar.Publish -> people find insight and try to pick it apart -> You either have flaws or you get reproduced... Only then should your paper be of any worth to be quoted or sighted from.The current system is glad-handing, intellectual protectionism and mastrubation.Academia has only itself to blame for this, and they are apparently

Peer review is broken. The assumption with peer review is that the review filters out bad research in a fair way. The reality is that it is neither fair nor particularly effective in preventing bad research slipping through.Part of the problem is the review quality is almost as inconsistent as the article quality.From experience I can tell you that rejecting papers is a lot more work than accepting them. It requires arguing things in such a way that it survives editor scrutiny. This in tur

The website dies if I try to figure out who the author (“sam”) is, but it sounds like they are used to some awful backwater of academia.They have this idea that a single editor screens papers to decide if they are uninteresting or fundamentally flawed, then they want a bunch of professors to do grunt work litigating the correctness of the experiments.In modern (post industrial revolution) branches of science, the work of determining what is worthy of publication is distributed amongst a pr

The current academic peer review system is an example of a process that worked fine when number of participants was small but fails at scale. I'd like to see something like hacker news or reddit's social version of vetting papers in addition to any formal review process, perhaps with additional moderation from known experts. There is currently no site for community review of articles or papers and I think it would be a great resource for scientists of all kinds.

I think a first step is to make reviews public, in particular also rejects. In particular the big journals like science and nature seem to rely on a very small set of reviewers and often papers get reviewed by nonexperts, we had a paper rejected when a reviewer contradicted scientific fact that is in textbooks. When we protested the decision they just send it back to the same reviewer who stayed with his claim. I think if these reviews would be public the journals would get much clearer feedback

Modern academia incentivizes quantity over quality, and reviewers for all but the most prestigious journals don't have sufficient time or expertise to properly review submitted papers. So this does not surprise me.

Is it a bureaucratic problem, perhaps? I don't want to recapitulate the many (and far better informed/experienced) discussions of this on HN in the past, but the economics of peer review seem really broken. There's a natural temptation for reviewers to rubber stamp things both favorably and unfavorably depending on circumstances, but it doesn't seem efficient to have experienced scientists spending valuable think time reviewing things like basic methodology - naturally they&#

Maybe I'm not explaining my point very well. I think the fact that some papers don't get reviewed, even post-publication, is a feature not a bug. Otherwise it starts to present an unnecessary and damaging hurdle to publication, even if the reviews are post-publication because it is an implicit promise of future work.A proper scientific journal is an efficient clearinghouse for information, in the same way that Hacker News is an efficient clearinghouse for tech news and commen

It's not about the publishing itself, it is all about the review.Anyone with an internet connection can write a "paper" and publish it, but that doesn't mean it is useful to the scientific community. Peer review allows the community to filter out quack papers, research which is inherently flawed, or research which has been done before.This leaves the journals filled with novel research meeting a minimum quality standard, allowing other scientists to build upon th

We already have a better mechanism for publishing and peer review.. it's called the internet. Literally the comments section of Reddit would work better. Reviews would be tied to a pseudonymous account instead of anonymous, allowing people to judge the quality of reviewers as well. Hacker News would work just as well too. It's also nearly free to setup a forum and frictionless to use compared to paying academic journals $100k for them to sell your own labour back to you. Cost and ease