Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just buy some favorable peer reviews for your latest paper? In the world of vanity self-publishing, Slate reports, you can not only buy praise, you can suggest improvements to your review.
Here’s what booksurge.com promises for only $399:
Give your book instant credibility and attention with a book review by New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh. . . From this marketing-style review, you can pull the most descriptive and alluring quote and place it on the back cover of your book and any other marketing materials you create.
Mmmm, descriptive and alluring. I wonder if she reviews blogs?
Update: Microsoft is now getting a hard time for buying reviews, too – although in this case, the reviews were to be part of Wikipedia entries. Ouch. To be fair, the blogger asked to edit the entries was an outside expert, not a Microsoft employee, and everyone knows Wikipedia is (unfortunately) rife with nonobjectivity. But that doesn’t make it ok. There is an implicit expectation of partisanship when a review is paid for. (Booksurge simply made those expectations explicit).
If the Microsoft whiz who thought this up had ever been involved in the scientific peer review process, including the extensive (but likely insufficient) precautions meant to prevent the backers of a study from exerting undue influence on the outcome, the problem should have been obvious. Perfect objectivity may be a chimera, but in science, its pursuit is required.