Stephen Heard on post-publication peer review:
This seems to me a huge irony about proposals to replace pre-publication with post-publication peer review. At first glance, such proposals seem like the ultimate democratization: everyone’s manuscript on an equal footing. My manuscript and yours, a Nobel prize-winner’s and the rankest amateur’s, all available for readers whose comments will bubble the very best to the top. But this democratization will, I worry, turn out to be self-disrupting. Its very existence (coupled with the enormity of our literature) seems to force us to use prioritization signals that restore the very privilege we thought we were stamping out.
I am a fellow in the Section of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism and Physician Scientist Development Program at the University of Chicago. My doctoral research focused on tissue engineering approaches to study stem and progenitor cell fate in the developing liver. Learn more.