Do We Still Need Peer Review?: An Argument for Change

The current peer review process is broken and unless changes are made it will soon die. In Do We Still Need Peer Review?, author Thomas H.P. Gould examines the evolution of peer review from the earliest attempts by the Church to evaluate scholarly works to the creation of academic peer review and finally to the current status of the process. Gould argues that without an immediate effort by scholars to institute reform, the future of peer review may cease to exist. As new technology provides authors with a direct, unsupervised route to publication, the peer review situation is nearing a tipping point, beyond which the nature of academic research will be profoundly altered. This book proposes that rather than tossing out peer review altogether, the process can be saved and made stronger, offering suggestions on how to do just that.