X informs me of a new effort, “Peer community in . . .”, which describes itself as “a free recommendation process of published and unpublished scientific papers.” So far this exists in only one field, Evolutionary Biology. But this looks like a great idea and I expect it will soon exist in statistics, political science, and many other areas.

Here’s how X describes it:

Authors of a preprint or of a published paper request a recommendation from the forum. If someone from the board finds the paper of interest, this person initiates a quick refereeing process with one or two referees and returns a review to the authors, with possible requests for modification, and if the lead reviewer is happy with the new version, the link to the paper and the reviews are published on PCI Evol Biol, which thus gives a stamp of validation to the contents in the paper. The paper can then be submitted for publication in any journal.

X thinks we should start small and have a PCI Computational Statistics. Seems like a good idea to me.

I suggested this idea for the Journal of the American Statistical Association, but they’re super-conservative, I don’t think they’re ever gonna do it. So I’m with X on this: I’d like to do PCI Computational Statistics (or PCI Stan?) unless anyone can explain to me why this is not a good idea.

It would be also good to have a sense of where all this is going. If PCI stays around, will there be a proliferation of PCI communities? Or will things shake down to just a few? Something should be done, that’s for sure: Arxiv is too unstructured, NBER is a restrictive club, traditional journals are too slow and waste most of their effort on the worst papers, twitter’s a joke, and blogs don’t scale.

So, again, any good reasons not to do this?