Peer review stuff

Ahoy there shipmates, extreme apologies and will not leave it so long next time.
So, where was I? Ah yes, peer review, do we need it? What’s the point of it? It is expensive and time consuming. Why not just publish the thing in your journal and be done with it.
Ok now I will explain myself before an editor finds me and throttles me.
At a meeting about a year ago the discussion on the purpose of Peer Review came up (it was a room full of editors, ahhhh) and someone blurted out why not publish everything we accept as we now have the tinternet. The room went quiet, heads slowly turned towards this chap in a very nice Armani suit, he had a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his head and his bottom lip was quivering, I could read his mind (did those words just come out of my face). Everyone just carried on the discussion as though nothing had happened.

But he made so much sense in a roundabout way. At the end of the day the article you reject for your journal will be published somewhere else, will it not? So, ok let’s say we get 5000 articles a year on a journal, obviously we will not have the page room to do this in print, which is the beauty of the tinternet (sorry about the tinternet, my girlfriend has instilled that one into my little brain). If I accept everything that comes into the journal then that is a lot of reviewing and a lot of editor time and a lot of resource.

What if a paper comes into the office and we just hit the accept button and publish it without peer review (Whoa there reel him in) well why not do wiki sites peer review what is stuck up there? Look at all the April fools articles that are published, how many are believed? So if we have published everything online then surely this is damaging, as readers will read and take results and conclusions away with them and potentially kill someone. But we can do post acceptance peer review, another publisher has tried this. People read the article and make comments on it and people can make their mind up. You can be quite sure if you put up rubbish someone in that field is going to sqwark. Any way it is up to you now I want you to use the discussion forum to discuss this between yourselves, I personally think it is a very important subject and needs to be addressed. The forum is http://groups.google.com/group/ismte-discussion-forum good luck and have a good chat. Hopefully see many of you at the Manuscript Central user conference in a couple of weeks.