Academia.edu crowdsources speedy peer review solution | Times Higher Education

"An academic social network is aiming to transform the peer review process using crowdsourcing. Academia.edu has launched a service called PaperRank, which gives each article on the site a score based on how many recommendations it has received from other researchers. This rating is weighted by the reputation of the scholar doing the recommending, which is calculated using the scores of their own articles. The highest scoring papers will then be promoted to other scholars with similar research interests. At first, the website is allowing 2,000 'editors' to rate papers, allowing researchers’ reputations on the site to develop gradually. These individuals must have experience of being journal editors and must be experts in their field. But, in the longer term, the website hopes to allow all of its 27 million members to rate papers. Richard Price, the founder and chief executive of Academia.edu, said that PaperRank would dramatically increase the number of peer reviews that a paper receives ..."