Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
The purpose of science publications is to share new results with other scientists, so others can build on or verify the correctness of the work. There has always been an element of “receiving credit” to this, but the communication aspect is what actually matters <i>from the perspective of maximizing scientific progress.</i><p>In the distant past, publication was an informal process that mostly involved mailing around letters, or for a major result, self-publishing a book. Eventually publishers began to devise formal journals for this purpose, and some of those journals began to receive more submissions than it was feasible to publish or verify just by reputation. Some of the more popular journals hit upon the idea of applying basic editorial standards to reject badly-written papers and obvious spam. Since the journal editors weren’t experts in all fields of science, they asked for volunteers to help with this process. That’s what peer review is.<p>Eventually bureaucrats (inside and largely outside of the scientific community) demanded a technique for measuring the productivity of a scientist, so they could allocate budgets or promotions. They hit on the idea of using publications in a few prestigious journals as a metric, which turned a useful process (sharing results with other scientists) into [from an outsider perspective] a process of receiving “academic points”, where the publication of a result appears to be the end-goal and not just an intermediate point in the validation of a result.<p>Still other outsiders, who misunderstand the entire process, are upset that intermediate results are sometimes incorrect. This confuses them, and they’re angry that the process sometimes assigns “points” to people who they perceive as undeserving. So instead of simply accepting that <i>sharing results widely to maximize the chance of verification</i> is the whole point of the publication process, or coming up with a better set of promotion metrics, they want to gum up the essential sharing process to make it much less efficient and reduce the fan-out degree and rate of publication. This whole mess seems like it could be handled a lot more intelligently.