Some reflections on scholarly reviewing [Commentary]

In the last few years, we have been facing a paradigm shift in scholarly publishing, due to the easy availability of scholarly work online, added to a substantial increase in the number of conferences, workshops, and seminars which publish their own proceedings. As one effect, new results are made available to scientists in a short time after their generation, which might lead to the conclusion that scholarly peer-reviewed publications, which suffer from a substantial time lag from submission to publication, have exhausted their role. We, however, do not believe that the role of these publications is being diminished, let alone exhausted. On the contrary, it will increasingly be that of providing a ¿quality stamp¿ to the best scientific results available, in contrast to the other, ¿read at own risk¿ sources. At the same time, to meet the challenge it is necessary, among other things, that the time elapsing from the generation of a result to its availability by the scientific community not be too long. This can help to avoid spreading results of dubious importance or accuracy, and to prevent the results themselves from being served after their freshness has faded.