Life in optical

Image: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Mike Brown, a famous astronomer (partially because he was instrumental in Pluto acquiring ‘Dwarf’ planetary status 3 years ago), has found fog on Titan with his students Alex Smith and Clare Chen.

This is a very cool discovery (cool enough to make fog) and he has submitted a paper describing the findings for publication in a scientific journal. In his blog entry, he also talk about one of the biggest limitations of the peer reviewing system: usually one or two scientists read the paper and decide whether it is worthy of publication or not.

So he invites whoever is willing to review his paper to submit comments for improvements.

The novelty lies in his commitment to take into account the feedback that improves the paper. If Nature has tried Open Peer Review before, this is rather different because it’s controlled by the author, not by the journal.

If this works, there is a fair chance that the journal will receive an edited version with more and different modifications than suggested by their “in-house” (= outsourced to their group of reviewers) referees. How will the editor and referee(s) react to that?

I find it bold to do on such a significant paper, not one that will go unnoticed. Very cool.

In fact, if this system grows to become institutionalised and an increasing number of scientific papers get reviewed openly like that, presumably the number of volunteer reviewers for each paper itself will be interesting to monitor. It would reflect a complicated chemistry of importance of discovery, popularity of topics and authors, etc.

Moreover, if crowdsourcing theory holds and if the crowd is big enough, factors like misunderstandings, individual bias, conflict of interest, etc. are likely to cancel each other out. Certainly a positive evolution.

I see another great potential in this system. Imagine what you could learn as a student – and what talent you could discover as professor, if you involved your students in reviewing papers? It is a useful skill to learn and the number of brains that could contribute ideas is multiplied. As this is ‘real’, it might be a motivation for students who get glued in their speciality to learn what is going on in other fields?

OK I’ll stop my speculations here. All the information is available on his blog ‘Mike Brown’s Planets‘ and in true Web2.0 fashion, the first appeal to Open Peer Review appeared in RSS feeds and twitter (see @plutokiller)

:)