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The researchers created a model of a generic specialist field where referees, selected at random, can fall into one of five categories. There are the "correct" who accept the good papers and reject the bad. There are the "altruists" and the "misanthropists", who accept or reject all papers respectively. Then there are the "rational", who reject papers that might draw attention away from their own work. And finally, there are the "random" who are not qualified to judge the quality of a paper because of incompetence or lack of time.
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Human nature being, well, human nature, you must wonder if anyone is truly capable of being a "correct" referee on every occasion. But if all referees could be "correct" every time, that would create an ideal peer review system.
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Thurner argues that science would benefit from the creation of a "market for scientific work".
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Would a market driven system not lead to an increased rate of publication of "drivel", given that there would be no peer review system to filter out the rot?
How would a particular journal be able to claim itself as being more "prestigious" than the next if there is no peer review system to ensure the quality of published papers? It would seem to me (maybe I am wrong!
) that a system like this would have the potential to bring all journals more or less into line with each other. I guess you may have one journal only bidding for papers of very high quality while a second journal (let's call it the "Thunderbolts Journal") might bid for more spurious papers and that would create a quality difference.
In my own profession we suffer from a number of fools who perform veterinary homeopathy. They will happily quote, as proof of their ludicrous claims, publications in "letters to the editor" sections of veterinary journals, or in the "Dog Breeders' newsletter" etc. These quotes mean nothing to me because I am a rational veterinarian, but when the average pet owner sees the same thing, they can be misled into thinking that a few paragraphs on quackery in a breed society newsletter can actually be valid information.
Stuart