Studies of quality in peer-reviewed scientific journals--

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's picture
Time scale: 
In the next 5 years

--will reveal that the plagiarism (not to mention other problems that, in retrospect, will often seem self-evident) is more common than previously realized, providing yet more ammunition against traditional peer review. One of the observations will be that most cases of plagiarism are detected relatively quickly after publication by readers, rather than by formal reviewers or editors; this will tend to reinforce the idea that 1) as Eric Raymond put it, "with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow," and that 2) in scientific publishing, smart crowds regularly outperform smart gatekeepers.

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