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• Friday, January 26, 2007 07:53 AM

  Peer review

  Victorycabal said:

  The strength of science publishing is the peer-review process. This anonymous and sometimes brutal process (in combination with solid editing) is responsible for the quality of the articles published in journals. It is also not free. If you remove that part of the process, you remove one of the major reasons why science, as a process, is so powerful. And you damage the quality of the science you do publish.

  VC conflates peer review with editing. Peer review is actually done for free by the academic community. Authors submit their articles freely to publishers, sign over copyright to the publisher, then other academic researchers perform peer review freely. Different journal publishers then perform different levels of editing of the accepted article. As VC points out, peer review is vital to the quality of science, but the costs of peer review are minimal to the publishers.

  Almost all Open Access journals have the peer review process in place. But scientific publishers know that "swift boating" works, even on PhDs.

  Imagine if Ford charged the current price for their cars, but got all of its parts for free, the assemblers worked for free, and Ford's only costs were management salaries and delivery charges. That's the current scientific publishing system. The internet and Open Access changes that, and publishers are scared. Not because science might be harmed, but because their profits will be.

  —Bogey
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