Technology Review: Blogs: Mims's Bits: 'Liquid Journals' Use the Web to Upend Peer Review

Technology Review: Blogs: Mims's Bits: 'Liquid Journals' Use the Web to Upend Peer Review: The zealous, relatively youthful programmers of Liquid Journal have concluded, and they're not alone in this, that the autocratic nature of "peer" review -- in which just three reviewers can, without fear their identities will ever be exposed, reject a paper for whatever reason they please, including a personal dislike of the submitter -- does not add value to the scientific process.

Like the blogosphere itself, Liquid Journals accrue readers not because they have a choke-hold on distribution, as is the case with traditional journals, but because their readers find them to be uniquely qualified to filter a particular field.

On top of this is the open commenting model that has grown up around pre-print servers like arXiv.org, which serves the physics and mathematical community. In this model, paper are reviewed by everyone who cares to contribute -- the difference is that, in Liquid Journals, algorithms will track various measures of the skill and reputation of reviewers, allowing new ways to filter for scientific resources by the quality an entire community has decided they possess.

Breakthroughs from the Second Tier - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

Breakthroughs from the Second Tier - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences: "One of the most commonly voiced criticisms of traditional peer review is that it discourages truly innovative ideas, rejecting field-changing papers while publishing ideas that fall into a status quo and the “hot” fields of the day—think RNAi, etc. Another is that it is nearly impossible to immediately spot the importance of a paper—to truly evaluate a paper, one needs months, if not years, to see the impact it has on its field.

In the following pages, we present some papers that suggest these two criticisms are correct, at least in part. These studies were published in lower-profile journals (all with current impact factors of 6 or below), suggesting they should have had less of an impact. But these papers eventually accumulated at least 1,000 citations. Many were rejected from higher-tier journals. All changed their fields forever."