[lazyjeff]

I read this article the other day, "There are four schools of thought on reforming peer review" [1] about how there's four schools of thought about how to reform publishing and peer review. Each of them independently are fairly well received and makes sense in itself, at least among my academic circles. However, there are tensions between them, so it's hard to come up with a solution that's universally satisfying to even the majority of stakeholders.

This article about ArXiv is clearly in the "Democracy and Transparency school" as categorized article, but it doesn't yet address the other three camps. The arxiv article proposes machine-readable semantics, easier sharing and discoverability, papers + supplementary materials + reviews all open; this floods the world with even more publications with varying quality, so it's even harder to identify good quality work; and when things can be more easily aggregated by machines and measured with the alternative metrics proposed, it often leads to a more powerful winner-takes-all system that can be gamed (there's now a subtle game of increasing citations that appear on Google Scholar); finally, with an increase in submissions and materials that go along with submissions, it puts an even greater strain on the review system. These problems are not unsolvable, but almost every idea I've seen proposed so far has only been in a single camp, and there's side effects that harm the goals of the other three camps. So I'd love to see more ideas that balance the interests of all four camps that want to reform peer review and publishing.

[1]: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/03/24/th...