Chris Anderson has a really nice discussion of two models of “peer-review” on Nature.Com where Nature is hosting a debate on the topic.

Technical solutions: Wisdom of the crowds
In the scarce world of limited pages in top journals, prestige is earned through those journals’ high standard and exclusivity. That comes, in part, from the process, which involves impressing the very discriminating combination of an editor and a few respected researchers. Defining ‘peer’ relatively narrowly is part of the game. It’s not always fair or efficient, but in a world ruled by reputation, having successfully run that gauntlet is proof of at least some kind of fitness.

But in the abundance market of online journals or that of post-publication filtering, where each paper is competing with all the other papers in its field, it’s more sensible to define ‘peer’ as broadly as possible, to maximize the power of collective intelligence. In that market, prestige is just one factor in many determining relevance for a reader, and the more filtering aids that can be brought to bear, the better. From that perspective, these are exciting times. The experiments of Nature, PLoS journals and others will reveal where and how these techniques work best. But Wikipedia and Digg have already demonstrated that they do work.

Tags: scholarly publishing