Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work. It constitutes a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards of quality, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper’s suitability for publication. Some in the world of academia are pondering whether peer review should change. This interesting topic came to us from The Scholarly Kitchen in their article, “Ask The Chefs: Should Peer Review Change?”
The author of the referenced article asked some of those folks that question and received some interesting answers. Here are just a couple:
“Questions like this always make me grumpy, as they imply a situation that simply does not exist in the real world. There is no Commissar of Scholarly Communications; there is no big “system” of how scholarly publishing is conducted. So to ask if peer review should change is the wrong question. The better question is: If you don’t like some aspect of peer review (or anything else), what are you doing to change it?”
“Yes. While peer review provides a valuable quality sieve for the overwhelming volume of manuscripts submitted for publication, in its current form it has become a costly and distorted barrier to publication.”
Melody K. Smith
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