Whether we like it or not, research is already, easily and increasingly, published outside of journals, and so are reviews. Reforming peer review, therefore, should mean working with the way science is shared in public, not ignoring it.

The first is that not every piece of research needs to fit the format of an academic paper to be useful to the world. Research can be of high quality while being highly incremental, part of a larger series of work, or done with a standardized pipeline (like the sequencing of a genome) that doesn’t require the typical format of ‘abstract – introduct... See more