Peer-Reviewed Research Over The Web

bhoman writes "The San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com) has an article today about Stanford biochemist Patrick O. Brown, who helped develop low-cost DNA microarrays for gene research. He is seeking $20M to start a foundation that would fund peer-review of research papers and then make them available for free over the web, thereby avoiding the high-cost of subscriptions common in existing research publications. Predictably, some publishers seem to be warning that their publishing model is hard to improve upon. The article mentions that a previous effort by Brown and others, The Public Library of Science garnered the signatures of 30,000 supporters, but then implies that it basically failed, suggesting that academics need the journals more than vice versa. Sounds like Brown's idea is exactly what the web is made for."

Comments

Re:Journal peer review is VERY strict

[prefect42]

The process of selection is done by assigning reviews to major professors in the field who are not submitting to the conference.

Bless, how naive. I'm a researcher in a red-brick university in England, and I know that to not always hold true. I've known cases where a submitter has received other peoples work for evaluation, along with an advice sheet recommending that they are forgiving since not enough papers had been put forward. They are also not always professors by any stretch of the imagination, I know people who have assessed submissions that lack even a PhD.

Reviewers are also required to find ALL spelling and grammer mistakes

Hoho. If that were honestly true then you wouldn't find any spelling and grammar mistakes in published papers. That's just not true.

Papers can and are quickly manufactured. You're clearly not reading around enough if you honestly believe that not to be so. In my current area there's all sorts of gaseous crap that gets written about Grid computing. Pick an upcoming area, research lots of long words, string them together, suggesting that it will be possible to develop a synergistic solution with another hot topic, and you've got a paper. Oops, forgot the graphs.

Sorry I've just become a cynic.

jh