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Wed Jun 27 13:05:24 2007 |
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Medaille's suggestions are constructive: offering institutional experiments
or reforms that might be improvements.
Our current system is to screen out error and poor quality by peer review.
But since journal editors and referees are not well-rewarded for doing a
good job, the system often weeds out high quality and lets low quality pass
through, and sometimes even takes high quality submissions and turns them
into lower quality publications (after two years of revise-and-resubmit).
And as others in this thread have pointed out, it often weeds out
creativity, and novelty, in substance and method.
At the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics a
few weeks ago, one of the papers discussed the difficulty Gary Becker had in
getting some of his innovative and controversial work published during the
early stages of his career. And James Buchanan in his talk, mentioned how a
paper of his on game theory was rejected by referees for lack of formal
expression, even though the editor (Robert Mundell) later granted that the
paper had made an important and sound point.
In the discussion after Buchanan's talk, I suggested that another paradigm
for publication would be to get a lot of stuff out there fast, and then
correct the errors on the fly. Wikipedia might be one attempt at this. (Or
Epinions, in the realm of product evaluations.)
When Wikipedia first came out, many of us were highly sceptical of how
reliable the information in it would be. But what has surprised me is how
good the average entry is; and what is indisputable is how fast new entries
are added; and how vast the coverage of topics. (Some of these issues are
discussed in part of a neat book by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail.)
Art Diamond
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