peer review

i read this loose parts comic and it reminded me of the debate regarding peer reviewed publishing and grant approval. the comic i think is true peer review, just great!
now apparently some people argue the current publishing system is out of date. right now, if you want your work to be taken seriously, you send in a manuscript to a journal. they briefly look at it and decide if they are going to take the time to send it out for peer reivew. if it does get sent out, your manuscript goes to about three other respected people who work in about the same field and they read the manuscript and send back comments. these comments are combined and sent back to you so you can make changes (these can be simple like add more background or complicated like do more experiments or explain these results more definatively). then you send the reworked manuscript back to the journal and they edit it, type set etc. and finally it comes out in print. that takes like ohhh 6 months i think (shorter or longer depending on journal). most of that time is occupied by the peer review. see the reviewers have other things to do than read your stupid paper so they put it off for a while. hence the debate that we should just publish things to the web, with a few controls. then people can trash on it there. it is immediately available and more widely available and cheaper than print journals.
another place that gets interest in terms of peer review is the awarding of government grants. again you submit your grant and it goes out for peer review (with all the indentifying info stripped from it). and basically other people in the field vote on if they think that idea is worth funding. i guess some people in the government want to just be able to fund ideas without that. it would be faster and then you could play favorites.
peer review is good. although one paper my name is on was rejected initially (currently be resubmitted to another journal) because the peer reviewer didn't read very carefully and just claimed that the research was too similar to what was already published; in fact, we had published something with a similar compound but it was a completely different application and showed dramatically different behavior. so the review process is only as good as the peers. and there are a lot of lazy people out there. plus the peer review process doesn't take advantage of the quickness of the internet that we now know and love. ACS (american chemical society) is trying to speed things up by using an on-line system they have named paragon to do the submitting, peer reviewing, and revising of drafts. not too bad, but a lot of people (my advisor included) don't really understand what they are doing and so the system isn't quite bullet-proof enough for them. the problem of reviewers taking forever to read the paper is also not solved by this system. part of the reason i think is that the process hasn't been given the excitement that say blogging has. your comments are immediately posted and you get to dialog back and forth, kind of. something needs to poke these slow people into moving at the speed of internet when they do their reviews!