IgorCarron

Let me make a simple observation here:

In the Paper of Catherine McGeoch and her co-author Cong Wang, they write:

"...As a case in point, our second project compares the V5 hardware chip used in our first study to a V6 chip that became operational after the study was completed. V6 is three to five times faster than V5, and can solve problems as large as n = 502...."

In other words, during the time it took to set up the algorithm and perform the study, Moore's law had been able to enable a classical approach to go five times faster. I am a big supporter of anything that does quantum computing but one should never lose sight of Moore's law.

http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/2013/05/randomized-thoughts...

Let me take the counterpoint: If peer review was a rubber stamping process then most journals or conference would publish most papers. Just take the journals and conferences I mentioned earlier and you'll see that their rejection stats are above 60-70% if not more.

With regard to the paper you mentioned http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/content/99/4/178.full

You need to go beyond the title of the paper. Please read the whole paper you are referencing and then please tell me how the following extract is running opposite to what I mentioned earlier:

" Opening up peer review ...The final step was, in my mind, to open up the whole process and conduct it in real time on the web in front of the eyes of anybody interested. Peer review would then be transformed from a black box into an open scientific discourse. Often I found the discourse around a study was a lot more interesting than the study itself. Now that I have left I am not sure if this system will be introduced...."

The simple fact is you understand peer review to mean how it is currently employed i.e. one time process used in the pre-publication stage (you do the review before the paper is published). That type of peer review is flawed as some bad papers still go through the process. What is proposed is having an on-going peer review so that over time, only the stronger papers stand. It really is not difficult to understand.

The position you take on the rubber stamping part of peer review is simply not serious at best in many areas of science and engineering. Ask anybody around you that has published in good journals or conferences. Hence I did not address this statement because it simply is not true. Try sending papers to ICML, Siggraph, SODA, Nature, etc, I doubt the peer reviews are performing any sorts of rubber stamping.

But once they have gone through that process and they are published it is simply very difficult to root out bad work given new data.

You might be aware of post publication peer review, yet, this model is not in use except through accidental replication exercises that sometimes uncover problems that eventually yield corrigendae or retraction. Currently it is very adhoc.

If you understand how science work beyond press releases, you'll know that the fraud and abuses will always be in the system. Post publication peer review is the only way to rooting out bad work that has been published or is in the preprint stage (I consder that if your preprint is out on arxiv or some other medium, it is in effect published).

Right now, for published papers, it is left as an exercise for journals to acknowledge they let some dubious work through. There is simply no economic incentive for a speedy process. If you read retractionwath.com often you'll notice that the current system is simply not regulating itself.

Open post publication peer review is a way to perform that function. Looking back it is formalizing the process by which people used to trust or not older work. It is also blurring the lines between preprints and published work since they are now under the same scrutiny.

I agree it is also less convenient for the press or the science press to be comfortable with this situation (post publication peer review) but Science becomes robust when it is clearly capable of rooting out bad work through processes like this one.

You are mistaken because you are, like many others, confusing peer review with "pre- publication peer review", the act of your peers judging a manuscript before publication as is currently implemented.

The peer review that is allowed by the system I mention actually enables post publication peer review. The review of papers that are already public (either in some preprint or in some published form).

Right now the only mechanism that is allowed in terms of feedback in the pre-publication peer review model, is writing to the journal for a corrigendum, or even a retraction. As witnessed in retractionwatch.com blog, few are enthusiastic about publishing corrections to papers that have gone through their inefficient pre-publication peer review process. Not only it is inefficient but it also directly yield examples such as the ones you, rightfully, point to.

from the outside it looks great. But still can't run in on Chrome/XP or on iOS4.

other ideas expressed on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Startup-Ideas/What-are-other-Frightenin...