Most of what this article is saying is old news to those of us who study academic publishing or scientific epistemology or whatever, but probably not to many working academics. So partly I think this just isn’t for you.
Further, though, I don’t think it’s useful to describe all academic discourse as “peer review”. Of course we need to read and respond to each other’s work.
But do we need the “review” as a central institution of academic publication? I’m not so sure.
@mikethicke agree. While I haven't done a rigorous deep dive on the issue, I suspect that the practice of academic "peer review" evolved primarily in the past as a way to ration access/use of what was once costly, high-investment printing & publishing processes.
But that's not our problem now, is it? We need more dialogue and less review-based gatekeeping, IMO.
@zwhnz @econproph @mikethicke Jim's point, I think, is that it has *become* that kind of gatekeeping with the shift to digital, as a way of creating scarcity in an otherwise abundant context. Definitely something to that, esp for prestige journals.
Enormous opportunity currently to rethink what we want PR to do. Not to "fix" it by making it open vs closed or any other such binary, but to ask what the goals are -- what we want the goals to be -- and design for that.
Mike Thicke
Econproph
Zoe Wake Hyde
John Maxwell
Chris Long