The Death of Peer Review

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Natasha Gilbert[Edit][Delete]: The Death of Peer Review, The Guardian [Edit][Delete] December 14, 2006
I have never been a big supporter of peer review, including that undertaken to evaluate approve publicly funded programs. I am not, though, particularly keen on the touted replacement, "statistical indicators, such as the number of postgraduate students in a department and the amount of money a department brings in through its research." I don't think human judgment should be replaced by statistics - but I do want to increase the number and broaden the range of the humans doing the judging. In fairness, I will note that Steven Harnad, who posted this item to the JISC list, criticizes the RAE process as "re-review" and argues in favour of metrics, as evidenced here and here.. More...