What is the best way to assure that an academic paper is worthwhile?

There's a new challenge to peer review, which means giving it to one or two knowledgeable peers and letting their comments determine the paper's fate. That method is called open access, and it's related to open source in that the paper is simply published on the Internet, with comments sought and encouraged.

Georgia State's Library reports that a survey of over 5,500 academics by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) found that nearly all, 96.2% preferred peer review, a closed source process in which only the academics involved know what's coming. But the respondents were critical of the length and cost of the current process.

And here is where it gets interesting:

Nearly half believed that open access (OA) publishing would undermine the current system, with 41% saying that would be a good thing. “The snapshot shows that the current system has a great deal of support and provides benefits,” said Graham Taylor, director of educational and academic publishing at the Publishers’ Association.

But nearly half think undermining the current system would be a good thing. Academia ignores that at its peril.