Let’s make peer review scientific
Shameless plug: I&#x27;m working at the MIT Media Lab on the PubPub project (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pubpub.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pubpub.org</a>), a free platform for totally open publishing designed to solve a lot of these problems:<p>One is peer review, which, as some have already mentioned, needs to be done in an open, ongoing, and interactive forum. Making peer review transparent to both parties (and the public) makes everyone more honest.<p>Another is the incentive of publication itself as the ultimate goal. Instead, we need to think of documents as evolving, growing bodies of knowledge and compilations of ongoing research. Every step of the scientific process is important, yet most of it is flattened and compressed and lost, like most negative results, which are ditched in search of sexy click-bait headliner results.<p>Another is the role of publishers as gatekeepers and arbiters of truth. We need a medium in which anyone can curate a journal, and in which submission, review, and acceptance procedures are consistent and transparent.<p>Another is the nature of the medium itself. It&#x27;s 2016, and these dead, flat, static PDFs are functionally identical to the paper they replaced! Insert your favorite Bret Victor&#x2F;Ted Nelson rant here: we need modern, digitally-native documents that are as rich as the information they contain.<p>Another is reproduciblity. We should be able to see the code that transformed the raw dataset, tweak it, and publish our own fork, while automatically keeping the thread of attribution.<p>The list goes on and on...