[return0]

> I'm sure there must be some way to achieve this and also make the content freely available. But whatever system replaces the current one has to deal with these issues too.

Post-publication peer review could solve all of these (and the access issue too!). I'm still not convinced of the superiority of pre-publication review by only 3 (usually quite busy) people max.

[dalke]

I haven't had good experience with modern post-publication peer review so far.

My biggest complaint is that few know those comments exist. For example, I commented on one paper to highlight methodological problems that make it impossible to trust their results. (They developed a new algorithm for X. They compared it to the naive implementation. The naive implementation was poorly coded. Most of the speedup disappears by in comparison to a well-written implementation.)

I've talked to a few people about this exact paper. None noticed the link to the comment page.

I say "modern" because post-publication peer review isn't new. One of the older mechanisms was the letter to the editor. Those letters (at least in the ACS journal I'm thinking of) have a DOI and are searchable. A few of these letters have proved useful to my research.

But the modern post-publication peer reviews don't have a DOI and aren't indexed by Google Scholar or other systems, so they are less useful than a old Letter to the Editor.

(I once asked about sending a Letter to the Editor to an Open Access journal, concerning problems in one of their publications. They said they don't support those sorts of short communications, and my only option was the $1,500 to publish a full paper, which would have to go through the normal peer review process.)

[Fomite]

I have been extremely unimpressed with my experiences post-publication peer-review. Limited to no feedback for many papers, and some clearly "How dare you stray onto my turf" related comments.

[visarga]

You mean Elsevier doesn't need to earn $2 billion for hustling free editors to do their work proper? You know, it's more than just pushing emails around. You have to deal with people.

[return0]

Have you accounted the cost of the many work-hours that reviewers spend beautifying their journals? it's probably in the tens of billions, worldwide. Is it justifiable? It's certainly not what the public is paying for.

[maaku]

I think you missed an Office Space reference.

[KKKKkkkk1]

I don't understand. What is the difference between post-publication peer review and no peer review? What is a journal for if the papers are not peer reviewed?

[kriro]

The simplest workflow I can think of:

1) Publish with no review

2) Open for review

3) If review is passed, tag as reviewed and bundle all those into a special reviewed section (which can be cited)

4) Reserve the right to remove from reviewed (some later reviewer finds major flaws etc.)

You'd have to handle the dynamic nature of papers (git-like) but in essence I'm thinking of a website with "all submitted papers" and a checkbox for "reviewed papers only". I think that would be valuable and people would likely leave the checkbox on by default.

I'm also curious if the review has to be blind in this model. I think it would be more valuable if the reviewers actually signed with their names and the review feedback was open as well. Shifts the value from being in a prestigious journal to being successfully reviewed by a smart/reputable person. Ideally doing these reviews would then become reputation building as well.

[return0]

It's not a journal, or it's a different kind of journal. I guess it would be like doing the whole review process in a very public way. Would that be worse? I don't know ... has anyone tried it?

I think we are heading that way anyway, the open access publishers are pushing the envelope here by making peer review more and more public (publishing reviewer names, or comments along with the paper).