Richard Akerman, in a 2 March post on Science Library Pad entitled “Soft peer review”, provides links to some interesting new reports on the subject. One is called “Social software and new opportunities for peer review”, via Library 2.0; another is “Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation” via Academic Productivity blog.

Richard is one of the contributors to Nature‘s web focus on peer review, published last year and archived in full on Peer to Peer (it contains 22 articles, including Richard’s, and remains open to comments from the community of peer-reviewers, authors and scientists).

In his Science Library Pad post, Richard concludes: "I do think the debate about “open” peer review vs. traditional peer review is a bit of a red herring, and it very much concerns me when people suggest that open review can replace traditional (or in the language of this posting “hard”) peer review. We have already had open peer review for years, it’s called preprint feedback, mailing lists, ArXiV, letters to the editor… it’s a tremendous addition to, but not replacement for, the rigourous anonymous peer review system needed to provide a publication filter."