Bypassing Peer Review

Eugene Russo addresses the increasing problem of researchers bypassing the peer review process for publication in the popular media.¹ There are many reasons for this, and they stem from the incompatibility of present-day peer review practices with the information age. This letter addresses peer review pros and cons (mainly for R&D) and presents an approach to overcome some of the more egregious roadblocks.

There are many reasons for performing peer review. Probably the main peer review benefit today is the filtering by credentialed experts of enormous amounts of data of widely varying quality. This allows the researcher to focus his/ her efforts on the highest-quality portion of that data, and not waste time on unsubstantiated data. It is the foundational requirement for high-quality text mining.

There are many reasons to avoid peer review, including time delay, theft of ideas, leaking of ideas, incompetent reviewers, poor research, and financial gain...