December 7, 2012
Professor's new book looks at peer review
Submitted by Communications and Marketing
Associate professor Thomas H.P. Gould's new book "Do We Still Need Peer Review? An Argument for Change" has been published by Scarecrow Press. Gould teaches advertising and social media in the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
In this work and several journal articles — ironically all peer-reviewed — Gould argues that the current peer review process is broken and unless changes are made it will soon die.
In his article, Gould examines the evolution of peer review from the earliest attempts by the church to evaluate scholarly works to the creation of academic peer review and finally to the current status of the process. Gould argues that without an immediate effort by scholars to institute reform, the future of peer review may cease to exist.
As new technology provides authors with a direct, unsupervised route to publication, the peer review model is nearing a tipping point, beyond which the nature of academic research will be profoundly altered. This book proposes that rather than tossing out peer review altogether, the process can be saved and made stronger and offers suggestions on how to do just that.
This is Gould's second book. He published "Creating the Academic Commons: Guidelines for Learning, Teaching and Research" in 2010.