Obliging everyone to undertake post-publication review would aid discoverability in a world without traditional journals, says Robert de Vries
Peer review sucks. That is the conclusion of a recent viral blog post by the American psychologist Adam Mastroianni. He’s not the first person to say this, of course. Other academics have been beating this drum for years. But Mastroianni has struck a chord with his compellingly unabashed argument that peer review should be abandoned.
After agreeing with how badly flawed peer review is, and warning of the nightmare scenario of clickbait and social media profile dictating the scholarly literature landscape, this very interesting Times Higher Education piece describes the features of a much better alternative. It is a scenario that sounds divine, so the cynic in us is sure it would never happen. But it doesn’t hurt to dream.
The key issue that any alternative system has to grapple with is discoverability. I’ll use my first-ever academic paper as an example. This paper followed the traditional publishing model. I submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, and, after more than a year and two rounds of revisions, it was published. It didn’t set the world on fire, but a steady trickle of citations over the years suggests that at least some people working in my field are reading it.
What would I have done with this paper in a world without peer-reviewed journals? I could have followed Mastroianni’s example and just uploaded a PDF to my website. Except I didn’t have a website. And even if I did, no one would have visited. I could have used social media to promote it, but I don’t use social media because, to adapt an old Stewart Lee joke, “the internet is a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home. Social media is like you constructed a sluice to let it in”.
