Peer Review

Rodney Brooks:

This blog is not peer reviewed at all. I write it, I put it out there, and people read it or not. It is my little megaphone that I alone control.

But I don’t think anyone, or at least I hope that no-one, thinks that I am publishing scientific papers here. They are my opinion pieces, and only worthwhile if there are people who have found my previous opinions to have turned out to be right in some way.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about peer review. This post is to share some of my experiences with peer review, both as an author and as an editor, from three decades ago.

In my opinion peer review is far from perfect. But with determination new and revolutionary ideas can get through the peer review process, though it may take some years. The problem is, of course, that most revolutionary ideas are wrong, so peer review tends to stomp hard on all of them. The alternative is to have everyone self publish and that is what is happening with the arXiv distribution service. Papers are getting posted there with no intent of ever undergoing peer review, and so they are effectively getting published with no review. This can be seen as part of the problem of populism where all self proclaimed experts are listened to with equal authority, and so there is no longer any expertise.