Seeing the Light

When I hang around the Society for American Archaeology meetings, I generally spend some time talking to several colleagues about the Internet and its potential––one old friend called me an evangelist for the World Wide Web, and I'm afraid that's not far off. What I heard, I've heard before. People––scientists especially––don't use the Internet for several reasons, some of them good, some of them bad.

Some find the web hopelessly trivial. One person told me the problem with the web is nobody ever "reads" a web site; they "check it out." Others speak of how uneasy the ease of access made them; and still others mention the innumerable terrible sites that are "out there." Some even say that the web will not be useful so long as "just anyone" can post there; and that the proliferation of bad web sites makes good web sites pointless.

There simply is no peer review on the web, they say. Unlike in scholarly journals, there is no mechanism to assure that the quality of the material that gets published is acceptable to the scientific community.

Ah, but they are incorrect. There is a way to do peer review on the web––but like the presence of the web is changing our society, putting peer review on the web is going to change the face of peer review drastically, and to my mind, in a manner long overdue.

I've been associated with the editorial side of academic journal publishing off and on since 1980. One thing I do know about academic publishing, is that the peer review system is in serious need of an overhaul. Too many times, the ostensible reasons and the political reality of peer review are excessively disparate. Theoretically, the reason for peer review is to further science, right? But, too often, reviews are cursory or negative or even positive without substance, and directed at the person's body of work (or simply the person's personality) rather than the specific issue at hand. I think the big culprit is blind reviewing. Most of all, the notion of blind reviewing is ludicrous. If a reviewer is cognizant of an issue enough to review a paper, s/he must know who wrote the paper, and alternatively, the author can probably guess the names of the selected reviewers. So the only thing that's truly blind in a "blind review" is the ownership of specific comments made on a specific paper; the comments that are the most cogent, the most interesting, and the single most important factor in determining the publication fate of a document.

Current Anthropology has the right idea. Open reviews, signed, with bibliographic references. Why can't we do that on the web? My idea is called "salon review" or "collaborative peer review," because it combines an open review system with the dynamic capabilities of web design and authorship.

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