“Peer Community In”: Beyond the traditional publishing model (guest post)

I recently learned about Peer Community In (PCI), a new system for reviewing and recommending preprints. I’m really intrigued.  It’s true that I’m an old fuddy-duddy who’s on record as saying that we often exaggerate the problems with the status quo, and as not liking to think outside the box.  And yet there are good reasons to think it might be good to have other ways beyond traditional journals to disseminate science.  We should experiment with a variety of new systems, and PCI seems like one well worth exploring.  Read on to learn more!

What follows is a guest post by Denis Bourguet (denis.bourguet@inra.fr), Benoit Facon (benoit.facon@inra.fr), Thomas Guillemaud (thomas.guillemaud@inra.fr), and Ruth Hufbauer (hufbauer@colostate.edu).  DB, BF, and TG are the founders of PCI, and RH is a colleague and member of the board of PCI Evol Biol.

We believe that the current system of publishing with academic journals suffers from four crucial problems. First,

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Post-publication peer review and the problem of privilege

It’s been hard to escape calls lately for a paradigm shift in scientific publishing (most of them starting with a pronouncement that “publishing is broken”). We’re supposed to abandon pre-publication peer review, and replace it with a system of online preprint posting, open to anybody with no or minimal screening, that allows post-publication “peer review” in the form of a commenting forum. The preprint servers are here already: ArXiv has been an important channel for communication in physics and mathematics for years now, and BioRχiv is newly arrived in biology. What’s interesting is the other half of the prescription: the notion that preprint servers obviate the need for pre-publication peer review or for the existence of conventional scientific journals – and we’d be better off without them.

Does this make sense?