I thought this article, Web journals threaten peer-review system, covers some of the things we discussed in class today. It describes PlosOne too, and how articles are debated after publication by colleagues who rate the research based on quality, originality and other factors. In particular, it notes how “democratizing the peer-review process” helps to accelerate the process of scientific discovery, and yet it also states that there could ultimately be a “deluge of junk science” or there could be online abuse.

I wonder whether there is really a web difference here though. There seems merely to be lots of dissatisfaction with the current “elitist” system in academia. And the web offers a useful avenue to circumvent the offline peer review system, since it facilitates the publication of information to many people at minimal cost. However, if such online journals become increasingly common in the future, it could possibly change our perception of knowledge in the realm of science; scientific knowledge will seem as uncertain and fluid as the information we obtained from Wikipedia. As in Wikipedia, the process of attaining knowledge will become more transparent as comments and discussion will be visible to the public. This may ultimately be good if it helps “underdogs” gain recognition and spread their knowledge to others more easily. The article incidentally referred to how mathematician Grigori Perelman posted his findings on arXiv and later won an award for his work.

I suppose the web, gives opportunity for us to bypass or circumvent traditional restrictions we face in the offline world. It has done that for music (bradsucks), and is doing so for knowledge as well. There is, however, the perpetual problem of quality control, which is especially significant for research and knowledge. An article criticizes Wikipedia for some of its defects.

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