When academic journals used paper media, limited space obliged editors to have referees review contributors’ manuscripts and selectively publish them, but the spread of the Internet has lowered the publication costs and the age of speed has outdated the peer-reviewed journals. To respond to the demands of the day, we should separate evaluation from publication and create a new system for evaluation. Here we propose a new system that replaces the current peer-review system named the recursive voting system. This system is founded on two principles, the principle of elitism "The more highly a researcher is estimated, the abler to estimate others’ research he or she is" and the principle of democracy "The more estimators participate in voting, the less unfair and less biased the result becomes."

A textbook of politics usually mentions the following as a defect of democracy: Democracy operates under majority rule, where those in the numerical majority are powerful and they tend to ride roughshod over the concerns of the minority. It is a problem of democracy to be solved how to protect the weak minority from the tyranny of the majority. Is this classical theory true?