| By: |
Frijters, Paul (University of Queensland);
Torgler, Benno (Queensland University of Technology) |
| Abstract: |
The current peer review system suffers from two key problems: promotion of an
in-crowd whose methods, opinions and innovations it protects; and failure to
represent the opinions and interests of non-peer clients. As a result, whole
disciplines orient themselves toward navel-gazing research questions of little
import to society or even science as a whole, and new methods and concepts
must be unusually persuasive to break through. We thus suggest a more
efficient and integrity-preserving system based on an open two-sided market in
which buyers and sellers of peer review services would both be subject to a
set of recursive quality indicators. We lay out key features we think would be
important to reduce the opportunities for gaming and that improve the signals
about the societal value of a contribution. Our suggestions include a level of
reward offered by the author of a paper to get refereed and a level of desired
quality of the referee. They include randomly selecting from a group of
referees that express a willingness to accept the offered contract. They
include the possibility that papers are put up by non-authors for peer-review
for assessment on different criteria, such as societal relevance. And they
finally include the possibility that referee reports themselves become
refereed by other referees. What we envisage is that such an open market in
which all elements are subject to peer review will over time lead to
specialized reviewers in different criteria, and more useful signals about the
nature and quality of any individual piece of work. Our incentivized market
set-up would both professionalize the peer review process and make it
completely transparent, an innovation long overdue. |
| Keywords: |
peer-review, public relevance, transparency, two-sided markets, market design |
| JEL: |
A14 A11 Z00 D72 L30 |
| Date: |
2016–04 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9894&r=sog |