Reviewing and Revamping the Double-Blind Peer Review Process

The traditional double-blind peer review process currently used to determine which articles are published in scientific journals is far from perfect. This article argues that the Internet can provide us with a better way to judge article quality using the opinion of every reader rather than that of only a couple of reviewers. The article offers a relatively simple business model that can provide funding for such a publishing system. The model contains three basic components, a reviewing component, a submission/cost component, and a distribution component, The reviewing component will be an electronic market through which quality feedback can be bought and sold. The submission/cost component will decide if an article should be published and distributed electronically on-line using volume forecasts by experienced forecasters who will be compensated according to the accuracy of their forecasts. Articles can be bought by anyone in the scientific or general community from the distribution component. Although not perfect, our proposal does possess many features that could be valuable to the scientific community.