soft peer review

Via Library 2.0 - Social Software and New Opportunities for Peer Review, I find a fantastic posting about the many different ways in which formal "hard" peer review can be enhanced by open web technologies:

Academic Productivity blog - Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation

Although I don’t think social software will ever replace hard evaluation processes such as traditional peer review, I suspect that soft evaluation systems(as those made possible by social software) will soon take over in terms of efficiency and scalability.

This is very much the position I took in my submission to the Nature peer review web focus, and which I will be re-emphasizing with a community-interaction angle in my upcoming Allen Press Seminar presentation.  I really like the comprehensive view that Academic Productivity has taken in looking at the many types of peer evaluation that can be provided on the open web, and the call for more APIs exposing more data for all of us to use.

I do think the debate about "open" peer review vs. traditional peer review is a bit of a red herring, and it very much concerns me when people suggest that open review can replace traditional (or in the language of this posting "hard") peer review.  We have already had open peer review for years, it's called preprint feedback, mailing lists, ArXiV, letters to the editor... it's a tremendous addition to, but not replacement for, the rigourous anonymous peer review system needed to provide a publication filter.