The lion's share of science and scholarship is founded on peer review...But some scientists and scholars are peerless: Their work is at such a high level that only they, or a very few like them, are even equipped to test and attest to its soundness.
Such is the case with the work of Grigori Perelman. It is a mistake to try to generalize this in any way: it doesn't scale. It does not follow from the fact that a rare genius like Perelman can transmit his huge and profound contribution by simply posting it publicly on the Web -- without refereeing or publication -- that anything at all has changed about the way the overwhelming majority of scientific and scholarly research continues to need to be quality-controlled: via classical peer review.
Nor has this anything at all to do with Open Access....OA continues to mean free online access to peer-reviewed research (after -- and sometimes before -- peer review), not to research free of peer review!
PS: See my comments on Perelman, arXiv, and OA here and here.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/02/2006 09:03:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
