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August 28, 2006, 01:18 PM ET
Looking Past Peer Review
When it does its job—and scientists do theirs—the peer-review process is "genius," writes Adam Rogers in the latest issue of Wired magazine. But when researchers make mistakes or act in bad faith, the process fails. Peer review, says Mr. Rogers, is "lousy at policing research."
It’s no surprise, then, that so many scientists are closely following Nature’s experiment with a Web-based version of the vetting process. Any author submitting a paper to the journal can choose to have his or her work posted on the Web for comment even as it gets the traditional peer-review treatment.
Like most scientific journals, Nature isn’t ready to jettison peer review. But some others have already taken the plunge, notes Mr. Rogers. arXiv, an online archive run by Cornell University, has become a popular testing ground for physicists and mathematicians. PLoS One, an open-access journal being developed by the Public Library of Science, is already billing itself as a clearinghouse for "work that deserves to get published without delay"—the kind of delay, it suggests, that is inevitable with peer review. —Brock Read
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