That established peer reviewed journals are struggling does not mean peer review itself will disappear. The reason they existed in the first place hasn't changed at all. That reason is time.

People tend to visit the same Web sites over and over again. Again: time. They don't have the time to explore every crumb of a site in the vastness of cyberspace, so when they find sites that suit their need, usually just a few, they visit them over and over again. What makes those sites successful is the same thing that has always made paper publications successful: variety, reliability, good writing, and good editing. That's why I visit Salon instead of digging up every blogger with an ax to grind.

In academic publishing, too, University administrations, book publishers, and others won't have more hours in the day in the future to wade through every would-be intellectual's writings, so they'll need some kind of system to ensure the quality of an intellectual's work. It'll need to come from a reliable, well known source.

Forms of publishing are changing. Who the gatekeepers are is changing. But the need for convenience and reliability isn't going away.

Dear Salon:

Perhaps public review, that is the review of academic writings by the general pubic is simply and ultimately a superior mode of review for the specific reason that such review is *not* limited to professional academics. Anyone can post a response to research published freely over the internet, so the research is more open to criticism, which in theory, should make it better. Furthermore, an intelligent readership will ignore poor reviewers just as quickly as it will question sloppy research. Publication in an elite journal may encourage proper research and publication, but it doesn't guarantee it. Otherwise, there would be no such purported phenomenon as peer-reviewed "junk science", such as a lot of positive climate change hypotheses have been accused of.

Scientific and research knowledge ultimately exist to serve the public and like any other free form of invention, must avoid the temptation of privatization and exclusivity after the advent of the New Enlightenment that the internet has brought. (Remember, the old Enlightenment, including the Protestant Reformation, was afforded by the invention of the printing press.) Mass publication implies mass participation. Its not enough to please fellow academics, anymore. A credible researcher has to be willing to submit himself for criticism by professionals in other fields and the public at large in order to truly and successfully leverage his academic reputation as a leading thinker and knowledge worker.

Knowledge is power and to be truly egalitarian, power must be shared. Professional knowledge is now gradually emerging as a public good.

Can we really live in a world without the Weekly World News?! Do we really WANT to?

All seriousness aside, the WWN has always stood proud as the one media outlet where you KNEW they were just bullsh*ttin' you. From their simulated-ivory-grain tower, they have proclaimed to the masses, "Don't believe the media hype!"

The absurdly over-the-top sensationalism wasn't merely entertainment, it was a winking, pinching commentary on the way we view our news outlets, and the information disseminated thusly. We could always get a good smirk on, glancing at the headlines in the supermarket check-out (carefully, don't want to get caught looking at THAT, you know...), confident in the knowledge that there's no freakin' way that any of that crazy crap could be true.

Now what have we? The so-called legitimate media? The ones who have lied to us, parroted the lies of our so-called leaders? Or do we turn to The Onion? While occasionally funny, (in about the same hit/miss ratio as the last ten years of Saturday Night Live), the Onion is too, well... (to crib a notion from Glenn Greenwald) SERIOUS.

Really, in these trying times, now more than ever, we need to be reminded that just because it's in the paper, it ain't necessarily true.

Bat Boy, we hardly knew ye.

Economists are not rocket scientists. Economists like to imagine that they are cool, and that the same rules for peer review apply to them, the same rules that apply to physicists and experimental medical geneticists.

Baloney! Peer review my elbow! Economists, if it's a good idea, then mazel tov. If not, then not. Actual scientists still live and die by peer review. Economists, on the other hand, judge each-others' lives' work by whether they can afford tassel loafers.

I'm an academic who somehow wound up at one of the "rural" universities. While I support your widening-access theory of the Internet, I resent the implication that we unfortunates can only publish through collaboration with someone somewhere "good". One of the main differences between small & large universities is the library. Only not anymore. Even three years ago I was asking my friends from Oxford & Harvard (& using my old account at MIT) to get articles not available in my library. Not anymore --- my university library has bought all kinds of electronic access at increasingly cheap rates, and Google makes it increasingly easy to find copies of preprints on line. This is the point of publication and peer review -- you don't need to know someone to know what they've learned.

Speaking of Google, people who've never heard of you don't decide to read your papers entirely by what university they are from. They mostly decide by how well your text matched their keyword search. So this is another widening of access -- the ability to search for quality publications based on semantic content instead of crude labels. Though this of course goes back to peer review. But in my experience, Google access to preprints can lead to better publications as more experienced authors find and assist novices with the right ideas.

Another consequence of the Internet's advances in communication is that people aren't afraid to leave the big universities & go somewhere beautiful & rural, maybe even foreign. As long as the students are good enough.

If it were, it would work. But it doesn't, and no amount of peer review could save it anyway. Unlike actual science, peer review in economics amounts to getting the right people to nod sagely at your paper, most likely because it hoves to their own pet theory. It doesn't equate to tangible research or real-world empirical data, because there isn't much in economics. Essentially, economics is the attempt to understand the workings of a clock while standing inside it, seeing only parts of it at any given moment, and without knowing what time it is.