Is Peer Review a Good Idea?

By Remco Heesen, Liam Kofi Bright. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2020

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo.

Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Safety Research, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b20c6540f78caff78ecc6887c8278646b45439ba