Bayesian Investor Blog

Ramblings of a somewhat libertarian stock market speculator

  • Archives of the Bayesian Investor Blog

Peer Review

Posted by Peter on May 28, 2007
Posted in: Science and Technology.

One obstacle to replacing proprietary peer-reviewed journals with open alternatives is the difficulty of getting good peer review.
The approach of having authors pay publishers to arrange the peer review will probably have some success, but appears to be a recipe for much slower than optimal migration to open publishing due to the incentives it provides for authors to stick with proprietary journals.
More radical alternatives usually raise doubts about whether their quality will rival traditional peer review, due to lack of incentives for someone to ensure that the peer review is done by disinterested peers.
My idea is to have a system where anyone can review papers that have been registered within the system. The reviews would be made public, without identifying the reviewer.
The system would reward reviewers with a reputation. Reviewers would have their reputation score increased if a paper they positively review is widely cited, or a paper they negatively review is retracted (by a larger amount, to offset the lower frequency of this result).
It ought to be possible to convince universities to give this score some weight in tenure decisions, and if so that would ensure an abundant supply of reviewers who are at least as objective as under the current system.
The simplest implementation of this would impair the anonymity of reviewers by enabling people to connect changes in scores with the timing of citations and retractions. That could probably be dealt with by adding a random delay before a score is recalculated.

Posts navigation

← Ending Romantic and Employment Relationships
The Purchase of Intimacy →
  • Recent Posts

    • Weak Links and Limits to Economic Growth
    • The God Test
    • Should You Honor an AI’s Picket Line?
    • Financial Costs of an AI Pause?
    • Progress Toward an AI Stock Bubble
    • The Infinity Machine
    • FRI’s Forecast of AI Impacts
    • War Claude
  • Recent Comments

    • Peter on Financial Costs of an AI Pause?
    • Rai Sur on Financial Costs of an AI Pause?
    • Peter on Financial Costs of an AI Pause?
    • Will Kiely on Financial Costs of an AI Pause?
    • Will Kiely on Financial Costs of an AI Pause?
  • Tags

    aging amm autism best posts bias brain bubbles CFAR climate communication skills consciousness covid diet effective altruism empires equality ethics evolution existential risks genetics happiness history honesty industrial revolution information economics IQ kelvinism law macroeconomics meditation mind uploading MIRI neuroscience prediction markets prizes psychology rationality relationships risks seasteading status stock market crash transhumanism war willpower
  • Categories

    • Announcements [B] (6)
    • Book Reviews (290)
    • Economics (194)
      • Idea Futures (44)
      • Investing (89)
    • Life, the Universe, and Everything (156)
      • Fermi Paradox (6)
      • Health (114)
      • Humor (11)
    • Movies (2)
    • Politics (207)
      • China (21)
      • Freedom (19)
      • Mideast (14)
      • U.S. Politics (86)
    • Science and Technology (281)
      • Artificial Intelligence (113)
      • Miscellaneous (20)
      • Molecular Assemblers (Advanced Nanotech) (16)
      • The Flynn Effect (16)
      • The Human Mind (111)
      • Virtual Worlds (4)
    • Uncategorized (14)
  • Archives

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Parament by Automattic.