I read with great interest James Langer’s article in the August 2000 issue of Physics Today (page 35) about changes in the electronic publishing business. I agree with most of Langer’s analysis of the electronic publishing industry but feel his article has omitted an important point regarding its potential.

Most Internet use today is in the form of one-way communication; essentially a faster version of the printing press or a high-speed advertising vehicle. A fundamental strength of the Internet which has yet to be fully realized is the potential for interactive communication among several parties—that is, collaboration. Our campus houses the internationally known Collaborative Bibliography of Women in Philosophy (http://billyboy.ius.indiana.edu/WomeninPhilosophy/WomeninPhilo.html), which runs on a single computer and is maintained by one student working part time. No one person created this bibliography. Hundreds of people from around the world have contributed, and continue to do so. As a result, the online, searchable bibliography is the most extensive and up-to-date one of its kind, created from the expertise of the entire community of philosophers.

Why do we do peer review? One distinguishing feature of doing science, as contrasted with literature, art, or philosophy, is a commitment to agreement, whether as collaboration among a research group, competitive collaboration between groups, or historical collaboration by improving on past efforts. Peer review is an attempt to reach widespread consensus, although this is easy to forget in the heat of the review process.

Can the new electronic media help us with peer review? As Langer points out, articles of low interest published on the Los Alamos e-print archive are ignored; he indicates this is a form of peer review. Why not formalize this process, making it possible for readers to submit comments, reviews, and reference links for an article they find interesting or relevant? Articles that generate lots of discussion, either positive or negative, would be perceived as important based on the number and quality of the comments. The extent of interest generated by an article might even be used in tenure and promotion decisions.

I have used the Web for peer review of student papers (students were allowed to rewrite papers for a higher grade after anonymous online feedback from others in the class). Such review is used currently in several English courses here.

Using a similar mechanism, authors could clarify, answer questions, and extend their work in response to criticism. An obvious role would exist for an editor/monitor, but less so than with most printed journals. I encourage the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics to break out of the printing-press mind-set and think of ways to use the new electronic media for more than one-way communication. Let’s create a genuinely interactive—and democratic—electronic journal similar to the Los Alamos archive, where almost anything can be submitted, but where any peer can review or comment on it, as occurs, for instance, in really good list server discussions.