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I'm currently working on a paper that took us 1 year to get the first draft out, and it's been stuck in the review process for 1.5 years. Despite all the different things the referee made us do, the central results have not changed at all.
I agree that a faster public back-and-forth is the model we should move to. GitHub is a good tool for this. That's one of the reasons why I was excited to do the Research in Public series. All the work is actually public if anyone should want to engage with it (though it lacks any visibility right now for anyone to do so.)
I’m imagining one person doing a quick first pass and publishing right away.
Then, instead of anonymous reviewers pointing out concerns, another researcher actually updates the work with those changes and publishes their results.
And so on.
the way editors of journals and magazines USED TO WORK. Fantastic
Mmm, since I've been in academia (14 years or so) I don't think it's ever worked that way.
I meant way back, before peer review. Like when the greats were running the journals, like 1910 or whatever
That was before the kinds of work I'm thinking about even existed.
I don't think so. When I say quick pass, I'm not saying it should be sloppy, just that the first author would do the immediately obvious stuff and write that up. The write up would still be high quality.
The subsequent authors would add the next levels of analysis that take up most of the time and usually only serve to increase confidence in the result.
Yes, I like that idea.
There used to be lots of lengthy back-and-forths amongst economists. Maybe that’s the solution to sensationalism and other problems of moving too fast: ie we start treating publications as part of an ongoing discussion rather than definitive analyses.
We used to joke in grad school about how the naive first regression, that takes about two minutes, ends up being basically right most of the time. That suggests a lot of value in high-speed economic “reporting”.