At Open …, Glyn Moody recently blogged that peer review, at least as it is done now, is not necessary. Moody writes that the system was set up in a time when opportunities to publish were scarce and "needed husbanding." Today though, Moody says that with the Internet, there are a plethora of publishing opportunities and "there are all kinds of systems that allow any scientist — or even the general public — to rate content and to vote it up towards a wider audience."
Deepak Singh at business|bytes|genes|molecules says he disagrees even though he is "not a huge fan of the current peer-review system." Singh writes that peer review can be a source of advice that improves the quality of science. He does, however, say that what goes through the peer-review process should be changed. "To put this another way, with peer-review we should be focussing on a subset of what we publish today, while the rest goes into blogs, Nature Precedings, self-published articles, etc," he writes.