alt Hacker News > However, I think it's high time to reconsider what scientific review is supposed to be
The old days the bottleneck was the physical sending out of papers. Now that's cheap. So make comments public. We're all on the same side. The people that will leave reviews are more likely to actually be invested in the topic rather than doing review as purely a service. It's not perfect but no system will be and we currently waste lots of time chasing reviewers
I agree. OpenReview is a good initiative, and while it has its own flaws, it's definitely a step in the right direction.
The arXiv and the derivative preprint repositories (e.g., bioRxiv) are other good initiatives.
However, I don't think it's enough to leave the content review completely to the community. There's are known issues with researchers using arXiv, for example, to stake claims on novel things, or readers jumping on the claims made by well-known institutions in preprints, which may turn out to be overconfident or bogus.
I believe that a number of checks (beyond plagiarism) need to happen before the paper is endorsed by a journal or a conference. Some of these can and should be done in a peer review-like format, but it needs to be heavily redesigned to support review quality without sacrificing speed. Also, there are things that we have good tools for (e.g., checking citation formatting), so this part should be integrated.
Plus, time may be one of the bottlenecks, but that's partly because publishers take money from academic institutions, yet expect voluntary service. There's no reason for this asymmetry, IMO.