flâneur

Three myths about scientific peer review – Michael Nielsen

michaelnielsen.org · 2,703 words · saved by 1 readers

What’s the future of scientific peer review? The way science is communicated is currently changing rapidly, leading to speculation that the peer review system itself might change. For example, the wildly successful physics preprint arXiv is only very lightly moderated, which has led many people to wonder if the peer review process might perhaps die out, or otherwise change beyond recognition. I’m currently finishing up a post on the future of peer review, which I’ll post in the near future. Before I get to that, though, I want to debunk three widely-believed myths about peer review, myths which can derail sensible discussion of the future of peer review. A brief terminological note before I get to the myths: the term “peer review” can mean many different things in science. In this post, I restrict my focus to the anonymous peer review system scientific journals use to decide whether to accept or reject scientific papers. The myth that scientists adopted peer review broadly and early in

What’s the future of scientific peer review? The way science is communicated is currently changing rapidly, leading to speculation that the peer review system itself might change. For example, the wildly successful physics preprint arXiv is only very lightly moderated, which has led many people to wonder if the peer review process might perhaps die out, or otherwise change beyond recognition. I’m currently finishing up a post on the future of peer review, which I’ll post in the near future. Before I get to that, though, I want to debunk three widely-believed myths about peer

related reading