Quality control in scholarly publishing: A new proposal

The Internet has fostered a faster, more interactive and effective model of scholarly publishing. However, as the quantity of information available is constantly increasing, its quality is threatened, since the traditional quality control mechanism of peer review is often not used (e.g., in online repositories of preprints, and by people publishing whatever they want on their Web pages). This paper describes a new kind of electronic scholarly journal, in which the standard submission‐review‐publication process is replaced by a more sophisticated approach, based on judgments expressed by the readers: in this way, each reader is, potentially, a peer reviewer. New ingredients, not found in similar approaches, are that each reader's judgment is weighted on the basis of the reader's skills as a reviewer, and that readers are encouraged to express correct judgments by a feedback mechanism that estimates their own quality. The new electronic scholarly journal is described in both intuitive and formal ways. Its effectiveness is tested by several laboratory experiments that simulate what might happen if the system were deployed and used.