Evolving Peer Review

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California provided a thoughtful post on the evolution in peer review. In it, she describes what she refers to as Nature's conservative experiment with open review. Starting June 5, Nature is running both open review and traditional peer review simultaneously in an experiment to see what might be gained or lost. The Nature open review site can be found at http://blogs.nature.com/nature/peerreview/trial/

An important point Kathleen makes is that peer review walks and talks differently in the humanities than in the sciences. Most of what we read about focuses on scientific journal publishing, probably because that's where the money is.