Library and Information Science Commons^™

Do We Still Need Peer Review? An Argument For Change [Review], Michael J. Hughes

Library Faculty Research

How long has peer review been in crisis? At what point does crisis outlast emergency to become status quo? Attacks on the weaknesses of peer review appear with such regularity that they have migrated from scholarly journals to newspapers and magazines. Notwithstanding criticism—and bold experiments such as the experimental open peer review given online to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s 2011 book Planned Obsolescence before its publication—the gears grind on, due in large part to the reward systems built around the mechanism of blind and anonymous review.