Scientific Peer Review Is Broken – Fighting to Fix It with Anonymity • Hacker News Board

Re: Scientific Peer Review Is Broken – Fighting to Fix It with Anonymity

#71

Post by p4bl0 » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 12:16 PM UTC

Peer review might be broken, but it's not anonymity that will fix it. For the simple reason that we already have double-blind reviews in many fields and the peer reviewing process is not any less broken there.

There are people who are thinking of multiple solutions, one that I think is interesting is the proposition of Open Scholar, dubbed "Independant Peer-Review". I submitted it to HN so we can discuss it without flooding this thread, if it interests HNers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8734271.

In there scheme, the papers are open access from the beginning, the peer reviewing process is open, and reviews are citable. I believe it would encourage better and deeper reviews.

It would also be very nice for young scientists or students who want to apply for a PhD grant to be able to show that they are able to write a comprehensive review of a paper in their field, and that their review was good enough to significantly improve the paper or to be selected by the authors and/or publishers to be released alongside the paper, for instance.

Re: Scientific Peer Review Is Broken – Fighting to Fix It with Anonymity

#72

Post by return0 » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 12:59 PM UTC

Pubpeer is not a peer review site, it's site with comments. I think they are doing it wrong by promoting it as "anonymous peer review", because by definition if its anonymous it can't be "peers". It should (continue to) be a companion to published papers that every once in a while does the service of spotting an error.

Re: Scientific Peer Review Is Broken – Fighting to Fix It with Anonymity

#73

Post by efangs » Fri, Dec 12, 2014, 12:28 AM UTC

pizza_boy wrote: post #35

With Publons.com ( https://publons.com ) we have different philosophy: the more transparency we can bring to the review process, the better. At the same time we recognise that both blind and double-blind peer review play an important role in generating quality research. Our approach is to focus on turning review of all kinds (including both pre- and post-publication) into a measurable research output -- something you…

Hi, I like the site and idea. I was wondering if you were thinking of taking it one step further, however, and making it an actual pre-print server?

I would think that if you expect people to take the "credit for reviewing" model seriously, then likewise they should take seriously the notion of "credit for being reviewed" or "credit for being upvoted".

Also, there would have to be a way to verify submitters/reviewers credentials (e.g. connection to a research institution). Obvious arXiv has a model for how this could be done.