Holy Cow, Peer Review

"Looking at it as dispassionately as possible, one could conclude that peer review is the only remaining significant raison d’être of formal scientific publishing in journals. Imagine that scientists, collectively, decided that sharing results were of paramount importance (a truism), but peer-review isn't considered important any longer. If you imagine that, then the whole publishing edifice would suddenly look very different. More like ArXiv (where, by the way, I found this interesting article). A recent report estimates that the “total revenues for the scientific, technical and medical publishing market are estimated to rise by 15.8% over the next three years – from $26bn in 2011 to just over $30bn in 2014.” If we assume an annual output of 1 million articles, this revenue – which, for practical purposes, equals the cost to science of access to research publications – equates to a cost of $3000 per article, and even if the output is 1.5 million articles, it’s still $2000 per article. So the real question is: is peer review worth that much? ...[G]iven its costs, can we really not deal with a lack of this quality assurance in the light of the benefits of universal and inexpensive Open Access that ArXiv-oid platforms could bring? Are we not dealing with it right now? We all know that almost all articles eventually meet their accepting journal editor, and it’s difficult to imagine that every article we find with a literature web search is of sufficient ‘quality’ (whatever that means anyway) for our purposes. And yes, we will encounter ‘rubbish’ articles. Don’t we now, with nigh universal peer review? But we deal with outliers in data all the time, and it is my conviction that we can deal with outliers in the literature just as well...."