Research Publication Peer-Review vs. Research Proposal Peer-Review I raise the following question for the research community to consider:
Why is it that the peer-review of research reports has been "out-sourced" by the research community -- with the consequence that access to its products (refereed journal articles) must be bought back by the research community -- whereas the peer-review of research proposals has not been, even though the peers doing the reviewing are in both cases the researchers themselves, and do the reviewing free of charge? Here is my hypothesis: Gutenberg. In the era when print-on-paper was the only way to disseminate and archive the research reports, the minor costs of reviewing and certifying their quality became intertwined with the major costs of disseminating and archiving them, purely because of the expensive and inefficient Gutenberg medium of dissemination and archiving. If the Internet had been available for disseminating and archiving refereed research reports, there would never have been a thought of charging for access to them, thereby blocking their potential impact and uptake. The minor costs of peer review would have been covered in other ways. Research journals, like research funding bodies, are quality-controllers. The latter determine which research meets the quality criteria for financial support, the former, which research meets the quality criteria for certified report (as having met the quality standards of that particular journal: there is a quality/impact hierarchy among journals). In both cases, the quality is reviewed (for free) by peers, that is, by qualified experts in the research in question. Well, we are now in the PostGutenberg era; the Internet is indeed available for disseminating and archiving refereed research reports. Isn't it time we disentwined the peer review of our research reports from the obsolete Gutenberg costs that are still blocking access to them, by self-archiving them in our own institutional Eprint Archives, both before and after peer review? http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 Stevan Harnad
