Open Peer Review
Two recent Nobel laureates, including Peter Higgs, have decried the “impact factor” paradigm for evaluating the “productivity” of university faculty, and many of my colleagues have acknowledged that the peer review system for selecting papers for publication has broken down under the pressure of young scientists desperate to “score” publications in the most prestigious journals (those which reject the largest fraction of submissions). To paraphrase Churchill, peer review is the worst form of evaluation, except for all the others. The goal of o’Peer is to fix the broken parts of peer review.
For the basic idea, see the essay I wrote in 2012. A PDF version is also available.
My first instinct in setting up this demo version of o’Peer was to generalize it to everything from Physics and the other “Hard Sciences” to “Soft Sciences”, Philosophy, Politics, Literature, Music and Art, but my daughter quickly disabused me of this fantasy. Each discipline has its own culture and its own criteria for excellence, and if there is to be an o’Peer for each discipline, it needs to be developed explicitly for that discipline.
Better to start with what I know best and see if we can make it work well enough to constitute a “proof of principle” that might entice others to follow suit.
o’Peer Physics
Postscript: As of January 2016, o’Peer Physics has apparently gone nowhere. This is probably unsurprising, as my promotional efforts have been simply to mention it at every opportunity and hope that the idea will catch on. The reality is that everyone who might participate already has a huge investment in the status quo and dares not tamper with the established order.
Ever the optimist, I wonder if perhaps I just need to cast my net wider. Although I accept the necessity of “tuning” the algorithm and its implementation for each discipline, I believe that the basic idea is universal: everyone needs help deciding what to read, and to be effective that help must come from some authority; this makes authority itself a valuable asset coveted by many and therefore subject to trickery and theft. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to make authority democratic and yet still credible?
I believe Medium could become an ideal environment for development of something like o’Peer for essays, stories, poetry and blogs. Please consider it. You are welcome to everything I have built so far (see below); I don’t care about profit or control, I just want to see it happen!
The software and algorithmic implementation of o’Peer will remain available to all under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Originally published at opeer.org.