Bereits im Jahr 2008 wetterte der langjährige Ex-Editor des British Medical Journal, Richard Smith, in Lab Times gegen das traditionelle Prepublication Peer Review-System. Jetzt legt er in einem Editorial im Journal of Medical Screening (vol. 18(3):113-14) noch einen drauf:

The evidence, as opposed to the opinion, on prepublication peer review shows that its effectiveness has not been demonstrated and that it is slow, expensive, largely a lottery, poor at spotting error, biased, anti-innovatory (as perhaps in this case), prone to abuse, and unable to detect fraud. The global cost of peer review is $1.9 billion, and it is a faith-based rather than evidence-based process, which is hugely ironic when it is at the heart of science.

My conclusion is that we should scrap prepublication peer review and concentrate on postpublication peer review, which has always been the ‘real’ peer review in that it decides whether a study matters or not. By postpublication peer review I do not mean the few published comments made on papers, but rather the whole ‘market of ideas,’ which has many participants and processes and moves like an economic market to determine the value of a paper. Prepublication peer review simply obstructs this process.

Interessanterweise haben die zwei US-Kognitionsforscher Dwight Kravitz und Chris Baker gerade einen sehr passenden Aufsatz in Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience veröffentlicht, in dem sie vorschlagen, wie eine Kombination aus Pre- und Postpublication Peer Review tatsächlich funktionieren könnte. Der Titel: Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal. Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »