Read on Twitter
why do people treat current peer review system as if it was optimized to help authors and advance science when its primary features - pre-publication review by 2-3 people, binary decisions, exclusive publication rights - are products of limitations of the technology of the day?
the system has its uses - and we have so completely integrated it into the structures of scientific careers that it is difficult to change it - but can we not at least try to imagine a better system, one that is designed to function in the 2020s instead of the 1870s?
imagine you were charged with designing a system of science community and peer review in the alternative universe where the internet was invented before the printing press - what would such a system look like?
i have my own ideas, of course - but i don't pretend to have all the answers - i am fairly confident, however, that a system designed from scratch for the Internet would retain few features of the current one
obviously, there are lots of challenges - chief among them how to design such a system so that it is equitable, effective and efficient, and how to get there from where we are today without screwing people over in the process
but we can't start to think about these challenges if - as is the case for so many of my otherwise creative and intellectually adventurous colleagues - our first reaction to any effort to change the system is to deem it both impossible and inadvisable
