As a software engineer who works on open source scientific applications and frameworks, when I look at this, I scratch my head and wonder 'why don't they just do the equivalent of a code review'? And that's really, where the germ of the idea behind this blog posting started. What if the scientific publishing process were more like an open source project? How would the need for peer-review be balanced with the need to publish? Who should bear the costs? Can a publishing model be created that minimizes bias and allows good ideas to emerge in the face of scientific groupthink?
It's a great question, and the post goes some way to sketching out how that might work in practice. It also dovetails nicely with my earlier post about whether we need traditional peer review anymore. Well worth reading.
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