(excerpt from Ludmila Kuncheva’s page)
“Reviewing will become obsolete. It has been needed in the past because there has been no way to tap on a larger readers’ audience for an opinion poll. Peer reviewing has been the only credible way to maintain standards of publication. The growing diversity of topics makes this process impractical, biased or spurious. We have technology now! We can allow for peer reviewing on a massive scale. Imagine a large pool of papers, automatically clustered and positioned within a big mosaic. Where do you look for papers? I doubt very much that you browse the contents of all relevant journals. Thank God for Internet! Now suppose that you have access to all papers. The best ones will be spotted and cited over and over. The citations will replace the reviews.
There will be fewer journals such as Nature, Science and Lancet. Only the best papers will find their place in the journals. These papers will no longer be original research, they will be rather “the best of…”. Selected by citation from the pool, say for the past 1 year, these papers can undergo a round of peer review. This time, however, the reviewing rules will be different:
- First, all reviews will be handsomely paid.
- Second, reviewers will bid for a paper. The candidates should submit their records, and the Editor will have the task to select among them.
As an additional benefit, we will kill fewer trees. Plus, a lot of human resource will be freed for better use of their expertise and energy. “