For the September Forum: On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 01:13:59PM +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote: > Greg feels that classical peer review is dysfunctional and unnecessary, > and that the only reason all physicists and mathematicians, even > those who self-archive their unrefereed preprints, continue to submit > their papers to peer-reviewed journals (and often to self-archive the > refereed version too) is for the sake of their university promotion/tenure > committees, who are not qualified to evaluate their work for themselves.
That's overstating things a little. I think that peer review *is* necessary but somewhat dysfunctional. I don't think that it's entirely dysfunctional. I also don't think that external merit is the ONLY reason that people send papers to journals, just the main reason. A Fields Medalist with no need to butress his formal credentials summed it up best: "I still submit my papers to journals, but I'm not sure why." I estimate that about 1/3 of my own papers were thoroughly reviewed by the referees. The rest were skimmed to varying degrees. A few were just rubberstamped. I think that with reform, 1/3 could be improved to 2/3. That would be very valuable, but I won't promise the world. -- /\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis) / \ \ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ \/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *
