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Comment by wickedchicken | Hacker News Reader

I see a pretty significant issue with "one-click voting" for a scientific paper. Reading papers is often a tough exercise and one that involves rereading, thinking, and rereading again. How many times have you read a dense webpage, reread it over the course of a week, then clicked the upvote on HN? Never. You glance at the webpage, think "that's neat" and click away.

This isn't to say that the journal-of-reviewers model is perfect, but I am wary of casually tossing it away in favor of "upvotes." Upvotes have massive semantic ambiguity: does it mean the article is accurate? Does it mean the article is funny? Is it maybe wrong, but important to think about? Does it merely match the reader's interest? How do you express something such as "we believe your underlying methodology is correct but aren't certain your analyses are rigorous enough to prevent X." A downvote?

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A better model would be something like what the Real-World Haskell book used when it was under development: allow comments (anonymous or otherwise) on each paragraph, and refine the content based on those comments. Of course, this does have the twin problems that it doesn't keep results private, and makes credit assignment a real pain :)

Even with all the problems it has, I actually prefer peer-review right now. Some of the stuff that gets self-published on arXiv is of sketchy quality, and there's just no quick way of figuring that out by just reading the abstract if a 'known' person hasn't co-authored it.

In physics at least, a substantial proportion of peer-review goes via arXiv first anyway, so it's not really an either-or. In many cases, the real peer-review happens when people see a new paper in their area on arXiv, they send in comments or challenges, etc. to the authors, and in the best case, by the time a journal article is submitted for formal peer review, many of the relevant peers have already reviewed and helped improve it.

Some mathematicians have also gotten pretty active in using blogs and wikis for peer review and even actively doing research. I don't expect journals to go away, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there are some areas of the sciences where they become more of a formal archival service: where papers go to be filed on shelves once the real action/review/dissemination has already happened.

fwiw, that's true for cs and stat, and I assume for math too. What I refer to is something like this:

http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/AND+AND+ti:+riemann+ti:+hypothes...

This is a particularly egregious example; but if I'm looking for something on a different subject where I don't know some of the notable researchers, or don't know what I'm looking for, it would take me a lot more time than I'd like to spend to filter out the more interesting papers.

  > allow comments (anonymous or otherwise) on each
  > paragraph, and refine the content based on those 
  > comments.

PLoSOne uses this model.

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