Open Access News

...When [peer review] works, it's genius – quality control that ensures the best papers get into the appropriate pages, lubricating communication and debate. It's the quiet soul of the scientific method: After forming hypotheses, collecting data, and crunching numbers, you report the results to learned colleagues and ask, "What do you folks think?"

But science is done by humans, and humans occasionally screw up. They plagiarize, fake data, take incorrect readings....The process is lousy at policing research. Bad papers get published, and work that's merely competent (boring) or wildly speculative (maverick) often gets rejected, enforcing a plodding conservatism...."Peer review was brilliant when distribution was a problem and you had to be selective about what you could publish," says Chris Surridge, managing editor of the online interdisciplinary journal PLoS ONE. But the Web has remapped the universe of scientific publishing – and as a result, peer review may finally get fixed.

The proof: In June, Nature began experimenting with a new method online. Authors submitting papers can choose a two-track process. While the work goes through the usual peer review drill, a preprint version gets posted on the Web. Anyone – even you – can comment, as long as you attach your name, affiliation, and email address...."The whole point of peer review is to help the editors select papers that are going to move science forward," says Linda Miller, US executive editor of Nature and the Nature research journals (Nature Biotechnology, Nature Genetics, et cetera). "If there's a better way, then why not? How could I say no?"

In other quarters, traditional peer review has already been abandoned. Physicists and mathematicians today mainly communicate via a Web site called arXiv....The online journal Biology Direct publishes any article for which the author can find three members of its editorial board to write reviews....And when PLoS ONE launches later this year, the papers on its site will have been evaluated only for technical merit – do the work right and acceptance is guaranteed. "Data becomes useful only if it's shared," Surridge says. "At the moment, our mechanisms for sharing information are the traditional journals, and if they're hard to get into, data is completely lost."...

[O]pen comments are great for nailing fakes and plagiarists. (The online community, not peer review, helped bust the South Korean stem cell fraud Woo Suk Hwang.)...Have papers that went through an open process and got rejected been essentially published already? Plus, the idea of all these articles online, free for the Googling, terrifies the lucrative journal-publishing industry.

But seriously: Who cares? An up-and-coming researcher can get more attention from the right experts by publishing something earthshaking on arXiv than by pushing it through the usual channels. Crazy ideas will get batted around in moderated forums, which is pretty much what the Internet is for. Eventually, printed journal articles will be quaint artifacts. Scientific papers will be living documents with data published on Web pages – commented on, linked to, and mirrored by labs doing the same work 6,000 miles away. Every research effort will have thousands of reviewers working in real time. Today's undergrads have never thought about the world any differently – they've never functioned without IM and Wikipedia and arXiv, and they're going to demand different kinds of review for different kinds of papers. It's in their nature.

Comments.

1. It's no accident that innovative forms of peer review are conjoined with OA initiatives. Both are ways of taking advantage of the internet. But (apologies, here comes my standard warning) it would be a mistake to assume that OA requires or even favors open review, when it only has some very promising synergies with it. Removing access barriers and reforming peer review are independent projects. OA is a kind of access, not a kind of quality control and is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative. Tying OA to just one model of peer review doubles the difficulty of persuading institutions to support OA.
2. ArXiv does not show that "traditional peer review has already been abandoned...." True, some arXiv users, like Grigory Perelman, think that depositing a preprint in arXiv suffices and that formal peer review is unnecessary, a potentially significant development. But that doesn't change the fact that most preprints in arXiv are steps along the way to publication in peer-reviewed journals. The real significance of arXiv is not that it bypasses peer review but that it bypasses price barriers, helps authors reach an audience orders of magnitude larger than the subscriber base of any journal, helps authors revise and improve their work, helps authors get an early time-stamp for their findings, and helps readers learn quickly about new work done by others.
3. And even if arXiv did show that traditional peer review had been abandoned, that would not be a reason to celebrate.  I certainly agree that traditional peer review is flawed and that new forms of open review are promising.  But we should be careful not to confuse two kinds of alternative to it. In trying to fix the faults of traditional peer review, the goal is a better system of quality control, not a professional consensus to bypass quality control. --Or, let me revise that, since the term "quality control" needlessly suggests ugly forms of control, perhaps left over from the days of limited space in expensive print publications. The goal is a better system for identifying good work, not a consensus that it can't or shouldn't be done. Open review may be that system, or part of it; I'm not offering an opinion about that here, merely distinguishing open review from non-review. We need reliable second-order judgments, not a retreat from judgment. Without saying that objectivity in science is easy or even attainable, we need to get as far as humanly possible past the swamp of politics, religion, money, ideology, and fad thinking, not a group decision to live in the swamp.  (I'm not saying that Rogers disagrees.)