We shouldn’t take peer review as the ‘gold standard’
What would be the alternative to peer review? White papers on “pop” topics? Opinion pieces by think tanks?The ideal of peer review is pretty much the gold standard of scientific work. By that, I mean the idea that your work should undergo rigorous scrutiny by your peers before it gets accepted for publications. As any other human system, though, the process is still subject to politics and biases.My hope is that a truly open review system might one day democratize science and ameliorate the issues with the current review system. For example, it would be cool to put all the revisions, reviews and authors’ comments in the open as an online appendix. That will show how the paper changes as it moves trough the process, the issues that the reviewers brought up, and how the authors responded to them. It will also help show if there is systemic bias against certain researchers or topics.