Blake Richards

What is the context? Who is "us"? Most people I know are happy to review papers when asked and are not too busy.

Most people I know say they are happy to review papers. But my experience as an editor tells me that it can be very hard to find reviewers.

Horrible idea

I think that people is severely underestimating the value of peer review. Everytime I read a preprint I need to spend time to assess the credibility of the author before deciding to keep reading. Often I use cheap strategies such as checking CV/institutions of the authors.

You've got an incentive problem: there's no prestige reward for reviewing on bioRxiv. The currency of science - prestige in the form of citations and recognition - is conferred by scholars on other scholars in part through hierarchies like editorial boards and invited reviews. /1

Part of the idea though is that you don't even review on arXiv. Instead, things that suck eventually get forgotten, whereas important findings keep getting returned to. It wouldn't always play out this way, but hopefully on average it would.

Or, we could limit the crazy drive of publish and perish to allow more time for both quality papers and quality reviews, for ex. by taking that anyone writing > N_MAX papers per week is not eligible for funding.

I agree this would ultimately be better. I just don't know a realistic means of limiting the current publish or perish drive.

There are many drawbacks here. 1) there won't be any guarantee of science ethics, reproducibility, plagiarism, etc etc. 2) there won't be any incentive in terms of quality (even the basics, like english). 3) there will be no standard. 4) there won't be a reward.

Finally, the peer review system is based on quality and innovation, while most of the arxiv-like platforms are based on hype and popularity. Eliminating the peer review, you would substitute a quality-based system with a popularity-based. Best ideas are rarely the most popular.