Natural selection of academic papers

Abstract

Academic papers, like genes, code for ideas or technological innovations that structure and transform the scientific organism and consequently the society at large. Genes are subject to the process of natural selection which ensures that only the fittest survive and contribute to the phenotype of the organism. The process of selection of academic papers, however, is far from natural. Commercial for-profit publishing houses have taken control over the evaluation and access to scientific information with serious consequences for the dissemination and advancement of knowledge. Academic authors and librarians are reacting by developing an alternative publishing system based on free-access journals and self-archiving in institutional repositories and global disciplinary libraries. Despite the emergence of such trends, the journal monopoly, rather than the scientific community, is still in control of selecting papers and setting academic standards. Here we propose a dynamical and transparent peer review process, which we believe will accelerate the transition to a fully open and free-for-all science that will allow the natural selection of the fittest ideas.

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

“…A relatively new mode of named pre-publication review is that of pre-arranged and invited review, originally proposed as author-guided peer review ( Perakakis et al , 2010), but now often called Peer Review by Endorsement (PRE). This has been implemented at RIO , and is functionally similar to the Contributed Submissions of PNAS ( pnas.org/site/authors/editorialpolicies.xhtml#contributed).…”

Problems with “natural selection of academic papers”

“…universities in a country). The negative comments on this system are unbalanced in Perakakis et al (2010) and so is their comment on the accessibility of this literature to scientists from developing countries. First of all there is the world-wide availability in repositories (as mentioned above)-and authors are even allowed to put their revised paper (as it is accepted in the journal) in the repository as a post-publication, including full bibliographical details (but not the pdf of the journal article in most cases-but there are exceptions).…”

“…One could say that an institute is paying subscriptions or consortia fees in the first model and is paying publication costs (in most cases) in the second model. We think this is a more balanced view on the publication problems than described in Perakakis et al (2010). Next we deal with peer review and alternatives.…”

“…So it is not true, as written in Perakakis et al (2010) that ''publishers control the peer review process''. Publishers support and facilitate the peer review process (e.g.…”

“…In the paper Perakakis et al (2010) the authors give an unbalanced view of classical peer review systems and of open access journals versus subscription based journals (or packages). Let it be clear from the beginning of this paper: We agree that journals (single subscriptions or package deals or consortia) published by commercial publishers are, in general, expensive (based on available budgets, posing a problem of accessibility by certain institutes) and secondly, peer review (for accepting or rejecting papers for journals) is not a perfect system for finding the ''best'' papers (as expressed by later impact of these papers, e.g.…”