It is often said that peer review is one of the pillars of scientific research. It is also well known that peer review doesn't actually do its job very well, and, every few years, people like me start writing articles about alternatives to peer review. This isn't one of those rants. Instead, I'm going to focus on something that is probably less well known: peer review actually has two jobs. It's used to provide minimal scrutiny for new scientific results, and to act as a gatekeeper for funding agencies.
What I would like to do here is outline some of the differences between peer review in these two jobs and the strengths and weaknesses of peer review in each case. This is not a rant against peer review, nor should it be—I have been pretty successful in both publications and grant applications over the last couple of years. But I think it's worth exploring the idea that peer review functions much better in the case of deciding the value of scientific research than it does when acting as a gatekeeper for scientific funding.
Naboj is a dynamical website that lets you review online scientific articles. Right now the only articles that are available for review are those that have been posted at Los Alamos arXiv.
D. Taraborelli (2008), Soft peer review. Social software and distributed scientific evaluation, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP 08), Carry-Le-Rouet, France, May 20-23, 2008
Drawing
on sociocultural theory, the present study investigated how children in an intensive elementary
level Grade 6 class for English as a second language (ESL) scaffolded each other while carrying
out cooperative learning tasks.
B. Cao, B. Plale, G. Subramanian, P. Missier, C. Goble, и Y. Simmhan. International Workshop on the role of Semantic Web in Provenance Management (SWPM), том 526 из CEUR Workshop Proceedings, стр. 1--6. CEUR-WS.org, (октября 2009)
N. Lele, L. Wu, R. Akavipat, и F. Menczer. HT '09: Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, New York, NY, USA, ACM, (июля 2009)
A. Halfaker, A. Kittur, R. Kraut, и J. Riedl. Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, стр. 15:1--15:10. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)