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Scientific publishing is changing. More scientific papers are being published now than at any other time in history. The digital era is facilitating new publishing practices, such as preprint servers and Open Access journals. At the same time, there is a growing concern among scientists about integrity and equity of the peer review process as we know it. These new practices present the scientific community with an array of new opportunities, which may help revitalize peer review and provide new means of scientific discourse. The astrobiology and origin of life (OoL) communities, as a young and dynamic fields of inquiry, can and should lead the broader scientific community in seizing these new opportunities by creating and utilizing new collaborative platforms.
The process of peer review is essential for scientific progress. For well over three hundred years the mechanisms used to instantiate some of the simple ideals of peer review have remained largely unchanged, until now. The digital era is making new mechanisms of scientific discourse possible by allowing information and methodology to be readily disseminated. A large new generation of technologically literate and globally connected scientists are demanding science move faster to keep pace with a dynamic world . Meanwhile, one of the key tenets of peer review, the reproduciblity of results, seems to be on the decline , and concomitantly the number of retractions in scientific literature is on the rise . I will outline some of the key features of these issues and argue that they are all symptoms of a peer review process which could be improved by utilizing new collaborative platforms.
What are the problems in peer review?
Scientific publications take a long time to process. The typical time between first submission and publication in traditional journals can be months or years, depending on the publisher. On its face, this is not a huge problem, peer review is a key feature of scientific progress and the means by which it is executed should be diligent, and through, which inevitably takes time. However, often manuscripts are rejected not because the the results presented are invalid, but rather because the writing could be clarified, because the editor of the journal finds it to be ill-placed, or because reviewers require more experiments to validate the results. In many of these situations, its preferable to have faster, direct communication with the peer reviewers, rather than slower anonymized communication mediated by a busy editor. Presently, there are few tools to facilitate the kind rapid, public, and collaborative review process which could improve the clarity and quality of manuscripts prior to their submission to journals.
In spite of the lengthy review process involved in most journal submissions, the number of retractions in scientific literature is rising . This could be due to a number of factors, including the possibility that invalid results are being found and refuted faster, which on it's face is a good thing for the peer review process. However a recent survey of more than 1500 scientists by Nature, reported that 90% agreed there is a reproducibility crisis in modern science, and more than half agreed that the crisis is "significant." Across every discipline surveyed, more than half of the respondents reported failing to reproduce someone else's work, but only 23% reported that they had tried to publish failed reproduction attempts and only 13% have successfully published the failure to reproduce those results. When asked about the factors which might be contributing to these issues, respondents overwhelming agreed that pressure to publish is an important factor, among other reasons such as insufficient peer review, poor instruction, and insufficient statistical tests.
An overwhelming pressure to publish is a common complaint among contemporary scientists  and particularly among early career scientists . On of the main driving factors behind this pressure is that citation statistics (so called bibliometrics)