Civil, sensible, and constructive peer review in APS journals

lished results are invisible to the community at large and are, therefore, equivalent to work that has never been done. Be-cause of this requirement to publish sound science, the process of peer review is part of our culture and has been integral to ensuring the highest quality of our publications since the 18th century (9). However, this concept has been questioned repeat-edly over the past few decades (2, 6, 10, 12, 13), and some have even advocated eliminating prepublication peer review altogether (1, 7). The underlying premise of this initiative is that anything in the correct format is publishable, and that postpublication scrutiny using blogs and comments, a vox populi of sorts, will ultimately expose the truth. This was called “scholarly skywriting ” almost two decades ago (5) and more recently “trial by twitter ” (11). While proponents of this school of thought have increased in number and influence, the Publi