Citation Auctions As a Method to Improve Selection of Scientific Papers (Report‪)‬

1. Introduction This work is the result of our insight and reflection on the refereeing process under which the scientific community has been suffering for many decades. The peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a process of subjecting an author's scientific work or ideas to the scrutiny of one or more others who are experts in the field. It is used primarily by publishers and funding agencies to select and to screen submissions of manuscripts and in awarding of funding for research. The process aims at getting authors to meet the standards of their discipline and thus achieve scientific objectivity. Publications and awards that have not undergone peer review are often regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals in many fields. However, the peer review, though universally used, is slow, time and resource consuming, and obstructs the emergence of new ideas by subjecting them to the control of prevailing dogmas or cliques. Moreover, highly prestigious qualified reviewers are a bottleneck of the peer review process, as there are not many of them, so they are overloaded or simply unwilling to participate in reviewing the papers for a particular publication. These drawbacks of peer review create a big problem for journals and conferences. We have observed that it is not unusual for a general chair of a conference to desperately seek reviewers very close to the deadline of announcing acceptance/rejection decisions for some fraction of submissions. Quality of such last moment peer reviews of course will remain questionable.