A reader writes:
How do people feel about peer review? Does it really help? Has it made papers better in authors’ experience? There is an overwhelming amount of commentary about how peer review is no longer in any sense the guarantee of quality that it is often assumed to be. The publishers have not wanted to take this message on board – much like they didn’t want to take open access seriously – but within the academy, I’m seeing critiques from all disciplines, and particularly from the sciences, which drove the uptake of peer review for the social sciences and humanities.
In my view, the fundamental problem is the way that the modern university fetishizes “output” in terms of journal publication (and books depending on the discipline), which creates enough perverse incentives that lead to mediocre writing, plagiarism and outright fraudulence, which to be fair, can’t be detected in most cases by peer reviewers.
Here is a good and representative summary of the various discontents.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
The main pernicious effect of peer review in philosophy (but probably in other disciplines) is to encourage conformity and conservativism. That may be unavoidable, and built into the idea of a Wissenschaft.
Thoughts from readers on peer review? Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.
