Is Peer reviewing so essential?

[A. Katz]

Yuri,

I didn't see the original discussion on peer review, but you bring up an 
interesting topic.

In theory, peer review is invaluable as a way to check ourselves and 
listen to constructive criticism. The problem is when peer review isn't open to 
everyone, and manuscripts that don't come from official channels don't get 
reviewed at all. Or the reviewer just says: there are a lot of errors and 
sweeping generalizations here, but fails to list any of the errors or the 
generalizations so that they can be examined and corrected.

Peer review is ultimately only as good as our peers are. If our peers are 
the Inquisition, as Galileo's were, there we're in deep trouble. But I 
think Einstein ultimately had some pretty good peers who recognized that 
his discoveries were genuine, provable -- and better than their work which 
had been funded, while his was not!

Here's to having good peers!

Best,

    --Aya

http://hubpages.com/profile/Aya+Katz


On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:

> Johanna Nichols wrote:
> Self-publishing bypasses peer review, and peer review is a much more
> important function of journal publication than boosting careers is.  Peer
> review is so essential to distinguishing science from pseudoscience that I
> don't think it should be bypassed, at least not very often.
> Johanna Nichols =
> Is Peer reviewing so essential? Would Bruno's, Galileo's, Copernicus', Einstein's theories have been published, if they had been peer reviewed? Peer reviewing is good for trivial or average books and articles without new scientific information. Don't you think so? How many articles of young linguists which are not trivial are rejected by journals? All? I wouldn't be surprised. Be well, Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk
>
>