<div dir="ltr"><div><span style="font-weight:bold;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Harnad, S. (2014) </span><b><a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/">Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute or supplement for the current outdated system?</a><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> </span></b><em style="font-weight:bold;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">LSE Impact Blog</em><span style="font-weight:bold;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> 8/21 </span><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>
</span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">EXCERPT:</span></div>
<div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">If, </span><a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-08/13/google-science-would-we-need-it" style="color:rgb(0,51,102);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">as rumoured</a><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">, google builds a platform for depositing unrefereed research papers for “peer-reviewing” via</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing" style="color:rgb(0,51,102);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">crowd-sourcing</a><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">, can this create a </span><em style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><a href="https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=harnad+%22peer+review%22+substitute+supplement" style="color:rgb(0,51,102)">substitute</a></em><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> for classical peer-review or will it merely </span><em style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=blg&gws_rd=ssl#q=site:openaccess.eprints.org+%22peer+review%22+substitute+supplement&tbm=blg" style="color:rgb(0,51,102)">supplement</a></em><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> classical peer review with crowd-sourcing?</span><br>
</div><div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">... </span><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px">no one knows whether crowd-sourced peer-review, even if it could work, would be scaleable or sustainable.</span></div>
<br style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">The key questions are hence:</span><blockquote style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">
<em>1. Would all (most? many?) authors be willing to post their unrefereed papers publicly (and in place of submitting them to journals!)?<br><br>2. Would all (most? many?) of the posted papers attract referees? competent experts?<br>
<br>3. Who/what decides whether the refereeing is competent, and whether the author has adequately complied? (Relying on a <a href="http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/L.Capra/publications/ubicrowd11.pdf" style="color:rgb(0,51,102)">Wikipedia-style cadre of 2nd-order crowd-sourcers</a> who gain authority recursively in proportion to how much 1st-order crowd-sourcing they have done — rather than on the basis of expertise — sounds like a way to generate Wikipedia quality, but not peer-reviewed quality…)<br>
<br><br>4. If any of this actually happens on any scale, will it be sustainable?<br><br>5. Would this make the landscape (unrefereed preprints, referee comments, revised postprints) as navigable and useful as classical peer review, or not?</em></blockquote>
<span style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">My own prediction (based on nearly a quarter century of </span><a href="http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/bbs.valedict.html" style="color:rgb(0,51,102);font-size:13px;font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">umpiring</a><span style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> both classical peer review and open peer commentary) is that crowdsourcing will provide an excellent supplement to classical peer review but not a substitute for it. Radical implementations will simply end up re-inventing classical peer review, but on a much faster and more efficient PostGutenberg platform. We will not realize this, however, until all of the peer-reviewed literature has first been made open access. And for that it is not sufficient for Google merely to provide a platform for authors to put their unrefereed papers, because most authors don’t even put their refereed papers in their institutional repositories until it is mandated by their institutions and funders.</span><br style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">
<div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div><a href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1121-Crowd-Sourced-Peer-Review-Substitute-or-Supplement.html">http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1121-Crowd-Sourced-Peer-Review-Substitute-or-Supplement.html</a></div>
</div>