Telescope Time Without Tears: A Distributed Approach to Peer Review

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed peer review system for telescope time allocation, aiming to reduce the burden on committees and improve fairness by leveraging community consensus.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed peer review mechanism that decentralizes telescope time allocation, addressing scalability and fairness issues in traditional processes.

Findings

Reduces reviewer burden significantly.

Aligns awarded projects with community consensus.

Potential to improve fairness and efficiency.

Abstract

The procedure that is currently employed to allocate time on telescopes is horribly onerous on those unfortunate astronomers who serve on the committees that administer the process, and is in danger of complete collapse as the number of applications steadily increases. Here, an alternative is presented, whereby the task is distributed around the astronomical community, with a suitable mechanism design established to steer the outcome toward awarding this precious resource to those projects where there is a consensus across the community that the science is most exciting and innovative.