Re: The religion of peer review

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Peer review is just qualified specialists vetting the work of 
their fellow-specialists before further specialists risk the time 
and effort of trying to build on it. Sometimes it's about 
protecting the public from health risk.

A religion - Anyone have a better idea? No vetting? Unqualified 
vetting? Opinion polls? Pot luck?

No one who has had to sit for a quarter century in a journal 
editorial office dealing with raw, unfiltered submissions has any 
doubt about the value, indeed the necessity, of qualified, 
answerable vetting, to protect researchers time and effort; but 
armchair speculation about it will no doubt proceed apace...

     Harnad, Stevan (1998/2000/2004) The invisible
     hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998)
     http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html
     Longer version in Exploit Interactive 5 (2000):
     http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/ and
     in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical
     Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.
     http://cogprints.org/1646/

> "THE RELIGION OF PEER REVIEW
>
> Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most 
> scientists (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in 
> peer review. It's something that's held "absolutely sacred" in 
> a field where people rarely accept anything with "blind faith," 
> says Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now CEO of 
> UnitedHealth Europe and board member of PLoS. "It's very 
> unscientific, really." This from a very interesting article - 
> worth reading through:
>
> Alison McCook.  Is Peer Review Broken?  The Scientist:  Magazine of
> the Life Sciences 20:2, page 26.  at:
> http://www.the-scientist.com/2006/2/1/26/1/