Chris Anderson
Scientific publishers should let their online readers become reviewers.
Who are the peers in peer review? In journals such as Nature, they usually have a PhD and work in a field relevant to the paper under consideration. If they are academics, they may be tenured professors, usually people on a relatively short list of experts who have agreed to review papers. This is a little élitist, but credentials such as PhDs and tenure are given in part to reward those things – experience, insight, brains and the respect of other researchers – that also make for wise advice. The process is not perfect, for reasons ranging from cronyism to capriciousness, yet long experience has shown it to be better than the alternatives.