From: "Armbruster, Chris" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:21:32 -0800
What crisis? The demand for peer review is growing, not only because
scholarly publishing continues to grow, but also because more
publishers/editors of journals/books decide to implement some form of
īrigorousīpeer review (i.e. in some areas of SSH peer review is still
new, some journals now have three peer reviewers per article etc.) and
because there is also increasing demand for peer review from other
sources like funders, appointment committees and so on.
Though we do not have data on just how much peer review has grown in
the past decades, there is no doubt that it has grown strongly, and
that this duty is being discharged by scholars everywhere.
What would help the discussion is a distinction between peer review as
quality assurance and as quality evaluation.
Quality evaluation is what is necessary when some form of selection is
required because only one (or a few) grants/positions/publication
slots may be awarded, but there are many more applicants/writers.
Quality assurance is possible when all that is needed is a judgement
as to whether the scholarship is sound, technically correct, worthy of
publication, worthy of a PhD etc.
PLoS One and other new megajournals are experimenting with peer review
as quality assurance- so far, successfully. This makes it possible to
consider if and how the peer review in publishing may be different
from the peer review for funding, appointments etc. Of course,
publishers have been striving to create exclusive journals (i.e. high
IF, high rejection rate), but the vast bulk of journals (and books)
are, by definition, not top-tier. One possible substitute strategy,
that worked well in the print world, is to create a small community or
specialist journal. Online, the resulting scarcity is artificial.
Consequently, it increasingly may be annoying when perfectly
publishable papers have to be peer reviewed multiple times before they
find an outlet. Interestingly, Berkeley Electronic Press responded to
this situation by creating tiered journals (i.e. frontiers, advances,
contributions, topics as four quality tiers; the journals are now
owned by DeGruyter). But this innovation was not picked up by the
system.
Principally speaking, scholarly communication would benefit if the
costs for peer review would sink (more time for research and teaching,
less costly publication process). As science continues to grow but a
decade of public austerity lies ahead, the publisher(s) that are able
to substantially reduce cost may be the ones that benefit. It remains
to be seen if PLoS One is the innovation that changes the system (for
bulk publishing, which would then move to OA), or if
subscription-based publishing is able to come up with a similarly
convincing solution.
Chris Armbruster, Berlin
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