The deluge of crappy papers must stop

Scientists often bemoan the state of originality in their field. New ideas are getting “harder to find.” Progress in large fields of science and technology is “slowing down.” Scientific knowledge has been in “clear secular decline.” (One wonders about the originality of their bemoaning.) But today’s researchers aren’t getting worse at coming up wit... See more

Journals rely on subsidies and subscriptions from institutional libraries, which pay enormous and growing costs to access articles. People outside of large institutions, without library subscriptions, are largely shut out from reading publicly funded academic research as well as reading the comments that reviewers have made on a paper. And despite ... See more

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.