[GOAL] Open Access to Peer Reviewed Research

[Stevan Harnad]

Many physicists say — and some may even believe — that peer review does not
add much to their work, that they would do fine with just unrefereed
preprints, and that they only continue to submit to peer-reviewed journals
because they need to satisfy their promotion/evaluation committees.

And some of them may even be right. Certainly the giants in the field don’t
benefit from peer review. They have no peers, and for them peer-review just
leads to regression on the mean.

But that criterion does not scale to the whole field, nor to other fields,
and peer review continues to be needed to maintain quality standards.
That’s just the nature of human endeavor.

And the quality vetting and tagging is needed before you risk investing the
time into reading, using and trying to build on work -- not after. (That's
why it's getting so hard to find referees, why they're taking so long (and
often not doing a conscientious enough job, especially for journals whose
quality standards are at or below the mean.)

Open Access means freeing peer-reviewed research from access tolls, not
freeing it from peer review...

Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review.
<http://cogprints.org/1646/> *Nature* [online] (5 Nov. 1998), *Exploit
Interactive* 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) *Peer Review: A
Critical Inquiry*. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.
http://cogprints.org/1646/

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/265617/>. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, (Eds.) *The
Future of the Academic Journal.* Chandos. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/265617/

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/>
. *D-Lib Magazine* 16 (7/8). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/

Harnad, S. (2014) Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute or supplement for
the current outdated system?
<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/>
 *LSE Impact Blog* 8/21 August 21 2014
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/
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