Abstract
Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo.
Highlights
Peer review plays a central role in contemporary academic life
Epistemic sorting happens not via the binary act of granting or withholding publication, but rather through sorting manuscripts into journals located on a prestige hierarchy that tracks scientific merit
Where above we argued that prepublication peer review is not making a positive difference often claimed for it, we downplay a potential benefit of our proposal
Summary
Peer review plays a central role in contemporary academic life. It sits at the critical juncture where scientific work is accepted for publication or rejected. While we admit to a number of cases where the evidence is ambiguous or lacking (see especially Section 5), we claim that the present state of the evidence suggests that abolishing prepublication peer review would lead to a peculiar sort of Pareto improvement: each factor considered is either neutral or favours our proposal. We say that this is a ‘peculiar sort of Pareto improvement’ because it is not a typical dominance argument. That even a sceptical reader will read on; if not to be convinced of the need of abolishing prepublication peer review, at least to see where in our view their future research efforts should concentrate if they are to shore up prepublication peer review’s claims to good epistemic standing
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