Journal peer review for blog posts

Tony Hirst of the OUseful Info blog has a great idea for academic journals - rather than standing aloof from the world of blogging, accept that many blog posts do have value and identify the better ones by means of peer review.

Tony's scheme would work as follows: People submit links to blog posts (or to other stories) to the journal's site. These then get reviewed by the journal's reviewers who make very simple yes-no type judgements, and depending on the number of votes a link gets it floats to the top or sinks into obscurity.

The idea is basically like having lots of mini-Digg's for academia, with the difference that not just anybody would be able to vote for or against a link, but only people designated as peer reviewers. As Tony points out, for this to work a journal would need to have many reviewers who are also active web users. What's nice about it though, is that reviewers won't be expected to spend a lot of time writing reviewers' reports and all that stuff - just a quick read and a simple decision - so it should be much easier to find cooperative reviewers than for conventional academic review.

I sometimes wonder if this model (quick review by many peers) might not sometimes also be useful for conventional academic publication, which currently relies too heavily on slow review by a few peers. There is also a third form of review already in use of course - slow review by many peers, which is essentially what happens when academic publications get cited by others in the years or decades following publication. This last form of review is in the long run perhaps the most useful of all, but is unfortunately currently still very much hampered by commercial indexing and abstracting services that are more interested in making money from citation data than in facilitating the tracking of academic conversations over time.

I look forward to the day when all academic content is freely available online and when a publication's list of sources cited is routinely also accompanied by a "this article has been cited by" list.