Re: Article on peer review

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

The Chronicle ran a story about this in its July 26 issue:
http://chronicle.com/article/Leading-Humanities-Journal/123696/

Here was my comment:

>An interesting experiment, but not so radical as it first appears
>since it was a highly "controlled" process in which 90 "recognized
>authorities" were invited to participate. This doesn't seem all that
>different from asking two or three such authorities to do a review
>and having them feel obligated to do so, instead of depending on
>some percentage of the 90 to take up the challenge. This likely is
>not a scalable approach as the participation rate would probably be
>minute if this were done for every issue of a journal--and the bias
>factor would go up since--as we all know from the responses to
>Chronicle stories--those who have an ax to grind are generally the
>ones who respond.


I would not call this "post-publication review," as Joe does, because
it is clear, at least from the Chronicle article, that publication
was not guaranteed in advance; the editor reserved the right to
reject the posted articles after receiving reviewer comments. I
wouldn't even call it fully open peer review since so many experts
were solicited for comments in advance.


Sandy Thatcher


>Article on peer review in the NY Times:
>
>http://j.mp/diUbLi
>
>The article describes an experiment in the humanities on "open
>peer review."  I would have called it post-publication peer
>review.
>
>Joe Esposito


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