A blog post published in the past few days discusses the pitfalls associated with post-publication peer review.

The author states: “One function of pre-publication review is redistribution of attention: it ensures that every paper gets closely read by at least a couple of experts, and none gets read by many (no paper ever gets hundreds or thousands of pre-publication reviews). Post-publication, attention (by any metric you care to name) is very highly concentrated: a small fraction of papers (the “scientific 1%“) attracts a large fraction of scientists’ collective scrutiny. Which is one reason I why I’ve long been a skeptic that post-publication review, in the form of uninvited reviews or other comments, can ever replace (as opposed to supplement) pre-publication review. Under post-publication “review”, the vast majority of papers don’t get reviewed in any meaningful way (e.g.).”.