"John Edser"  wrote
>
> This circus is mostly due to the fact of artificially limited competition.
>
The problem is, there is no competition. If you are an academic library, you
have to subscribe to Nature. Two subscriptions to Science will not
sustitute.
>
> Because most pure research remains publicly funded "peer
review" can be
> abused to reduce competition. Here more powerful individuals attempt to
> maintain a higher status position against competition from lower status
> individuals with better ideas by having these individuals and  their ideas
> unethically censored.
>
Peer reviewing does several things. It keeps out kook theories, it keeps out
competent but sub-average research, and of course it has the potential to
keep out important new theories from outside. Historically, almost every big
scientific breakthrough has been from people who were outside the formal
hierarchy. However this doesn't mean that almost everyone from outside the
hierarchy produces a big breakthrough.
>
> This is why I argue that an sbe peer review process to
> electronically publish sbe papers would  be of immense value because it
> would bring some of these problems out into the open as well as supplying
a
> reachablegoal for sbe subscribers and a higher grade of evolutionary
theory
> information within sbe itself.
>
Any paper journal worth the name has more material submitted than it can
publish. Peer review is one method for deciding how to choose the limited
number of papers you will publish. To regard it as anything more than that,
for instance as a benchmark of accuracy, is making the mistake of arguing
from authority.
An electronic journal doesn't have the same problem, so we need to develop
different techniques for evaluating content.
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