Agonizing over peer review is a perennial theme in conversations among scholars. I have given this some thought, and in this attached document, I propose an alternative “proceedings” model for publication in political science, my home discipline: [PDF]
A point that I make in the document is that, in other disciplines like computer science, proceedings-type publications are the highest-prestige outlets, and conventional journals are considered second-tier. So, there is nothing essential about conventional journals for granting prestige.
Something that I do not make explicit, but is implicit, in this model, is that there is ample scope for scholars to be entrepreneurial in organizing new events, perhaps even one-off events or short-termed series, that generate new proceedings outlets. An overarching governing body (like an APSA section) could serve to “certify” such proceedings. This would be an alternative to “special issues” of journals that are sometimes arranged to serve a similar purpose, but again tend to be bogged down unnecessarily by hurdles associated with operating through conventional publication processes.
P.S.: For those interested in models of publication alternative to the conventional closed-review, closed-access formats, here are two to consider:
- NIPS Proceedings (link) are the peer-reviewed proceedings of the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference, a major forum for advances in machine learning. Note that papers are posted along with their reviews.
- Theoretical Economics (link) is an open-source journal focusing on economic theory and published by the Econometric Society. Note that they host using software generated by Open Journal Systems of the Public Knowledge Project (link).
