Current and Evolving Models of Peer Review

New models of scientific publishing and new ways of practicing peer review have injected a recent dynamism into the scholarly communication system. In this article, we delineate the context of the traditional peer-review model, reflect on some of the first experiences with open peer review, and forecast some of the challenges that new models for peer review will have to meet. Our findings suggest that the peer-review function has the potential to be divorced from the journal system, so that the responsibility to judge the significance of a paper may no longer fall exclusively to formal reviewers, but may be assessed by the whole readership community.