With open peer review, open is just the beginning

Abstract

Open peer review does not just mean publishing existing reviewer reports, but should also lead to writing reports primarily for the public. We make a specific proposal for structured reviewer reports, based on the three criteria validity, interest and clarity.
This post is partly based on a joint proposal with Anton Akhmerov for improving the structure of reviewer reports at SciPost. Feedback from Jean-Sébastien Caux on that proposal is gratefully acknowledged.

 

Benefits of open peer review: the obvious and the less obvious

In the traditional model of academic peer review, reviewers’ reports on the submitted article are kept confidential, and this is a big source of inefficiency and waste. If the article is published, the readers can neither assess how rigorous the process was, nor benefit directly from the reviewers’ insights. If it is rejected, the work has to start all over again at another journal.

Open peer review, defined here as making the reports public, could help journals remedy the penury of reviewers: if applied to rejected articles, by avoiding duplicating effort, and if coupled with naming reviewers, by giving them better incentives to do the work. However, the consequences of open peer review may be more far-reaching. Published reports can indeed be used for evaluating the article’s interest and quality. In aggregate, they could be used for evaluating journals and researchers. For these purposes, they would certainly be better than citation counts.

Academics and Wikipedia: the WikiJournal experiment

Since November 2017, I have been an editor of the WikiJournal of Science, a Wikipedia-integrated, broad scope, libre open access journal. For me this is one way of encouraging academics to write in Wikipedia, by making it possible to publish Wikipedia articles in a recognized academic journal. The WikiJournals as they now exist may not yet be ideal for that, but they are already providing valuable insights into the difference between Wikipedia standards and academic standards, academics' attitudes towards Wikipedia, etc.

I am discussing these insights in a Wikipedia essay, for which this blog post is an announcement. This leads me to suggest that WikiJournals be radically reformed - or that any organization with similar aims should follow a different approach. The essay can be discussed at its Talk page.

Solving two-dimensional conformal field theories

This is the text of my habilitation defense, which took place on December 21st 2018. The members of the jury were Denis Bernard, Matthias Gaberdiel, Jesper Jacobsen, Vyacheslav Rychkov, Véronique Terras, Gérard Watts and Jean-Bernard Zuber.

In this habilitation defense, I gave a subjective overview of some recent progress in solving two-dimensional conformal field theories. I discussed what solving means and which techniques can be used. I insisted that there is much to discover about Virasoro-based CFTs, i.e. CFTs that have no symmetries beyond conformal symmetry. I claimed that we should start with CFTs that exist for generic central charges, because they are simpler than CFTs at rational central charges, and can nevertheless include them as special cases or limits. Finally, I argued that in addition to writing research articles, we should use various other media, in particular Wikipedia. 

 

Introduction

Two-dimensional CFTs are defined by the presence of a Virasoro symmetry algebra. This symmetry is sometimes enough for solving CFTs, and even classifying the CFTs that obey some extra conditions. For example, we can classify CFTs whose spaces of states decompose into finitely many irreducible representations of the Virasoro algebra: they are called minimal models. In some cases, Virasoro symmetry is not enough, but the CFT can nevertheless be solved thanks to additional symmetries. In particular, we can have symmetry algebras that contain the Virasoro algebra.
Let me discuss a few CFTs that I find particularly interesting. I will classify them according to their symmetry algebras, and characterize these algebras by the spins of the corresponding chiral fields. In this notation, the Virasoro algebra is \((2)\), as its generators are the modes of the energy-momentum tensor, which has spin \(2\). The sum of the spins of the generators gives you a rough idea of the complexity of an algebra.

Where should academics write if they want to be read?

Out of the 2 million academic articles that are published each year, many are not read by anyone but their authors, and most have no more than a handful of readers. For someone who writes in order to spread ideas, and does not publish just to avoid perishing, this can be quite discouraging. Of course, not everything one has to say is of interest to many people. Still, part of the problem could come from the academic article as a venue, and one may wonder whether other writing venues (such as a blog) could reach more readers.

In this post I will list various venues for scientific writing, and try to do an order-of-magnitude comparison between them. I will not simply estimate how many readers are reached: a tweet may reach many people, but it is read in seconds and can be quickly forgotten. Rather, I will try to estimate the ratio between the time spent by all readers on a text, and the time spent writing it.

Why don't academics write in Wikipedia?

Since several years ago, Wikipedia is being widely used by academics. As a theoretical physicist, I often use it as a quick reference for mathematical terminology and results. Wikipedia is useful in spite of its many gaps and flaws: there was no general article on two-dimensional conformal field theory until I started one recently, the article on minimal models is itself minimal, and googling conformal blocks sends you to a discussion on StackExchange, since there is nothing on Wikipedia.

The paradox is that many academics see these gaps and flaws in the coverage of their own favourite subjects, yet do nothing to correct them. Let me discuss three possible reasons for this passivity: fear of Wikipedia, lack of time, and laziness.

The jungle outside the ivory tower

 

Attracting and retaining academic contributors has long been recognized as a challenge by Wikipedians, to the extent that there are guidelines on how to do it.

Conformal blocks at Physics.StackExchange

I realized that the first Google hit for "conformal blocks" was a discussion at Physics.StackExchange about "A pedestrian explanation of conformal blocks".
This discussion is quite interesting and there are a number of good quality answers. But these answers were written in the span a few days, and they do not amount to a complete or satisfactory explanation of conformal blocks.

Such an explanation should probably be written as a Wikipedia article. But before writing it, one should probably rewrite the article on conformal field theory, and more generally build a decent set of articles on that subject. So, as a quick fix, I just added my own explanation of conformal blocks to the discussion in question.