Cognitive Daily on open peer review
Cognitive Daily: Nature's report on open peer review
I'm a bit behind on writing posts because of the launch of the author and referee's website earlier this week (www.nature.com/authors) Somewhat belatedly, therefore, but none the worse for it, I'm drawing attention to a post on Cognitive Daily (link at top of this post) about Nature's peer-review trial, and about the odds for open peer review in general.
In his post, Dave Munger writes: "What kind of incentives would work? The most obvious would be career incentives: if work as a reviewer was rewarded with tenure and promotion, it would soon become one of the top priorities of any scholar. Unfortunately this revolutionary change in the glacial world of academia is about as likely as PZ Myers undergoing a religious conversion, so we probably will need to look elsewhere. Many journals already require authors to review articles as a condition of submitting articles for publication. Perhaps this sort of incentive could be adapted to an open review process. Even so, it would be difficult to administer. How would reviewers be evaluated? By authors? But then wouldn't there be an incentive for reviewers to rubber-stamp articles for publication? For now, it appears that the peer review process as it stands might be the lesser evil."
Dave concludes that some combination of wikis and blogs might one day partially replace traditional peer reivew. But, he says, "Only when contributing to these resources becomes part of the tenure rewards system are they likely to become important factors in the world of academic publishing."