In this episode we talked to Davide Grossi about peer review. Davide is a decision making and mechanism design researcher at University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam.
We first covered the state of peer review today: How it’s being done and how it’s going wrong – Davide likens the outcome of reviews to a lottery: Whether you get a positive or negative review seems to depend more on chance than on the quality of your work.
Then we dove into potential solutions and new designs for a fairer and more effective peer review system. Besides reducing the amount of reviews in general, Davide suggested some interesting new avenues for exploration when it comes to how we decide which proposals and publications get the limelight or funding.
There’s a lot more to be done before we find the “best” way to perform peer review. Davide is calling for a science of peer review to systematically engage with the design choices around this pillar of scientific integrity.
