A Proposal for the Establishment of Review Boards - a flexible approach to the selection of academic knowledge

TL;DR

This paper proposes a flexible, internet-based review system where authors publish papers online, reviewers evaluate them on various criteria, and readers use search engines to find papers based on personalized judgments, reducing costs and increasing adaptability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel review process separating publication, review, and archiving, enabling customizable selection criteria and potentially lowering publication costs.

Findings

Conceptual framework for online review separation

Potential for cost reduction in academic publishing

Enhanced flexibility in paper selection for readers

Abstract

Paper journals use a small number of trusted academics to select information on behalf of all their readers. This inflexibility in the selection was justified due to the expense of publishing. The advent of cheap distribution via the internet allows a new trade-off between time and expense and the flexibility of the selection process. This paper explores one such possible process one where the role of mark-up and archiving is separated from that of review. The idea is that authors publish their papers on their own web pages or in a public paper archive, a board of reviewers judge that paper on a number of different criteria. The detailed results of the reviews are stored in such a way as to enable readers to use these judgements to find the papers they want using search engines on the web. Thus instead of journals using generic selection criteria readers can set their own to suit their needs. The resulting system might be even cheaper than web-journals to implement.