The preprint battle in neuroscience has gradually been won. I think the next step will be more dramatic -- a collapse in peer review resources to service each paper.
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Vast majority of papers (good ones!) are incremental (this is not disparaging), expanding on established concepts and using standard methods. They are read mostly by domain experts who, whether they reviewed it or not, will have their own views anyway. These don't really need peer review.
Now there are those papers that are making big claims or whose claims prove to become influential. These need much more serious peer review than they currently get and the people doing peer review of these papers need much more credit for their work.
No levers needed. It will be a natural death of routine peer review on the basis of no one having time for the volume of work being produced and there being almost no incentive to review.
Sure, but as someone who presumably wants to see this happen in the short term, you must have given some thoughts about how to move things along (nature editorials, for example).
For example, concrete statements from employers about how preprints should be viewed for promotion/hiring?
Nature et al won't be killed by this change for big those claims at the outset. Other papers will become influential later in preprint state and they can be picked up as needed.
But incremental paper can also contain nonsense. How would you tackle with that? Even today, the journals like MDPI, substantially increased the number of published papers. One never knows whether the paper their can be trusted - at least one needs to read it closely. You propose to expand this..
First, crap peer review does not necessarily catch these anyway. But, second, the consumers of most papers are domain experts and they can judge for themselves.
I have many instances in my career of interesting, worthwhile, but incremental results or even half-written papers that I leave languishing in a folder somewhere simply because it's not worth the months/years of extra effort it will take to get even an iterative paper through peer review.
Writing my best version of such a paper and depositing on a public preprint server, and never bothering to submit to a traditional journal, is an excellent solution. I think I (and others) would do this kind of thing more as preprints start to get more value in and of themselves.
I have done this for a review that I wrote with @rmhead.bsky.social . It's getting lots of citations. Many ppl talked to me very positively about it.Yet, there won't be any actual paper (submitted once but the reviews were so harsh yet useless) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.14.435278v1
Don’t you worry that this would lead to a proliferation of poor quality papers? There are many places in the world where scientists are incentivized not to conduct research but rather to produce papers.
The journal system (and peer review) are still university and granting agencies go-to evaluation tool. Are there good ideas around on workable alternatives?
It will die a natural death. The incentives to peer review everything are just to weak. The change I suggest won't kill prestige -- it will be prestigious to get your paper reviewed and there will more or less prestigious venues for peer review. And that's a good thing IMO.
ironically perhaps, it will die also with real deaths, as the ones who hold the levers of power pass on and leave them to those of us who came up in a dying sytem. will be slow at first, then all at once.
Thanks for the tip. From website it's hard to figure out anything concrete. There's a lot beauracratese and buzzwords. Is there any actual progress? https://coara.eu/
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For example, concrete statements from employers about how preprints should be viewed for promotion/hiring?
I have many instances in my career of interesting, worthwhile, but incremental results or even half-written papers that I leave languishing in a folder somewhere simply because it's not worth the months/years of extra effort it will take to get even an iterative paper through peer review.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.14.435278v1