Great, just great.

that I'm not a scientist, and I appreciate the review process for helping to weed out the nonsense. The Internet has created a forum for "scientific papers" that are neither paper or scientific. The problem that creates is that, while I'm interested in research in a number of areas, I do not have the training or experience to fully judge papers in most of those areas.

The peer-review process, at least, lets those with that training and experience give such papers a good going-over. Errors still happen, but not with the frequency they happen when no peer-review takes place.

So, I prefer information that comes from peer-reviewed journals, and will continue to prefer that.

Papers get sent back for edits because the peer didn't like the tone of the article, or it conflicts with his opinions (yes, scientists can be as petty as the rest of us). It slows down the progress of science while the article is sitting in the reviewers inbox for sometimes months. It plays into the hands of these big publishing outfits who are the gatekeepers to the peers who will do the reviewing.

I often use the 'number of authors' test to weed out unscientific gibberish -- the more authors on the paper, the more it represents a consensus opinion. The papers that come out of CERN with a couple dozen authors, I'm not sure that a peer reviewer has much to add to the process.

Got to judge things by their merits, not by the opinion of a couple of critics. If you only went to Academy Award winner movies, you'd miss out on a lot of good stuff.

As a basic filter, though, for the casual follower of scientific research, it does save a lot of time. That's why I generally use peer-reviewed publications to catch up on what's going on in several fields. Everyone has his or her own method for filtering. I'll just keep using mine. In some fields, I only review abstracts, really.

In many schools and disciplines, the author list might include the grad student grunts who carried out the actual research. Some of those "cast of thousands" papers are related to large projects where one or two PIs did a lot of theorizing and their students did most of the heavy lifting.

That said, conference proceedings can be a good source of articles... and they usually describe more recent work. And they're often peer-reviewed, too.

This is addressing the fact that the businesses that control nearly all of the peer review journals are intent on maximizing profits at the expense of dissemination of the product into the public sphere.

Due to the cost of publication there used to be a solid reason that it was difficult to access the information that had undergone peer review, but modern technology has changed the economics of that sector and it is now a cash cow.

... to move the responsibility for organizing the peer-review process (which is volunteer-based, anyway) out of the publishers' bailiwick and into non-profits formed by academics, specifically for that purpose.

If you read the article, you'll see that *nobody* is advocating to end peer-review process. Rather, the call is going out to start the work of moving this process out of corporate boardrooms and into academia, itself. ArXiv.org, as the article mentions, publishes unreviewed papers, but once they are peer-reviewed and published, you can't read even one article without paying upwards of $25... PER ARTICLE. Look into a subscription sometime!

So the open access movement has NOTHING to do with ending peer-review. If anything, the process will be less beholden to corporate publishers and administrators -- and therefore less biased toward grant-winning research areas.

Check out this site.

http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=browse&uiLanguage=en

I'll check it out.

imagine the wackadoodlery that'll find its way into science journals.

And some are, as pointed out by Jackpine Radical, just above. I just spent some time looking at the variety that's available, and it's interesting. The most prominent of them charge a hefty publication fee to the author, and all of the ones I looked at use a double-blind peer review system. I've picked out a couple that I'll follow and see how they are over time. There's really no reason that journals shouldn't be freely available to online reading, except for the high cost of publication on paper. If the author fees, along with whatever advertising a journal chooses to use can cover costs, it may well open up reliable journal publication for all of us to read, without the pay wall currently in use.

I miss having full university library access, like I used to have as an alumnus at my alma mater in California. I can't afford to pay to read journals.

There's no reason it couldn't work. However there is general prestige problem. If you're a young professor trying to get a full professorship you are unlikely want to have a lot of on-line peer reviewed stuff as that stuff tends to have less prestige and there are simply a lot of crappy on-line journals with poor content control.

Either way the problem has nothing to do with the peer review process. It has everything to do with access to information. Certain journal publishing companies are notorious for having hugely expensive subscription rates. This forces libraries and other academic institutions to pay a lot of money to carry their journals. Thus a lot of good journal published papers simply sit unread because fewer and fewer institutions can carry anything but the main "most prestigious" journals. A bad publishing company or editor can run a good journal into the ground. Cheaper online journals today could very well end up being a gold standard journal tomorrow. But it will take time as there is big pressure for young scientists to get papers to places that "count".

Peer review is important, but review by experts in other fields is really needed, too. Particularly regarding medical, health, nutrition, economics, and various types of population studies, we really need critiques from those outside the particular "peer" group, no matter how prestigious the peered.

Elsevier is not a favorite of mine. It has repeatedly acted in way counter to the interests of the scientific coomunities, universities, and the dissemination of knowledge. It seems only interested in money and power.

When somebody bashes Peer Review I usually assume the person is a woo-woo nutjob.

On the other hand, I dislike not being able to access full journal articles without paying to read them. However, abandoning peer review isn't the answer, I'm sure.

nothing is perfect, but open source is hard to beat when it comes to peer review.

lots of the most successful software that runs business, gov, and the very internet, is open source.

i like it.

... a peer-reviewed WIKI! The software already exists, they just need to put it to use.

On edit: OOPS! I didn't catch that post that got in right before mine.

... is always a plus, whether in science or government.

Much of the research is funded by tax dollars. These journals demand payment for research that I as a taxpayer have already paid for. I can understand charging to defray printing costs for bound journals, but online? No way.

Check out the list:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050828210650/libraries.mit.edu/about/scholarly/expensive-titles.html

Unfortunately the elite journals are firmly entrenched among the old guard of today's prestigious universities. Young academics who must publish or perish are often facing an uphill battle when they choose to embrace open research access. Seems the more expensive the journal you're published in, the more highly regarded you are as a researcher.

I'd like to see scientific publication follow the Open Source Software model.

The prestigious scientific journals would be the equivalent of Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc., with their own repositories of extensively peer reviewed works, followed by a multitude of lesser repositories of increasingly specialized work.

Traditional print journals are the equivalent of music labels publishing compact discs or vinyl records.

I find it amusing that for important works it's possible to find and download journal articles as easily as popular music or videos. Scientists have their own informal versions of the Pirate Bay.

A less amusing aspect of the major journals' restriction of information flow is the distortion it causes in citations. It inflates the value of major works at the expense of substantial middle works. The rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer.

... But I REALLY like the analogy of Linux distros and repositories. Like GitHub meets Mendeley meets Wikipeeria mentioned earlier in the thread -- the possibilities are fairly mind-boggling!

For instance, peers would no longer be limited to the finished report, alone. Other documents could be included, everything between raw data to marginalia could be included, not just the polished report, in some cases giving direct access (source code!) to experimental models or, in the case of CS, applied math, engineering, etc., the 'experiment' itself! When we the taxpayers are paying for, i.e., climate research, we expect a certain level of public access to not just the peer-reviewed result, but to accountability and transparency of the review process, itself, so that naysayers can't dismiss the science they don't like with that old chestnut.

EOM.