Boston Blog

How to speed up the peer review process: punish the slowpokes!

Marc Hauser of Harvard has recently published an interesting letter in PloS Biology, proposing a solution for the problem of reviewers taking way too long to review papers for journals.

Here’s his proposed solution:

We recommend the following policy for reviewers who turn in their reviews late: for every day since receipt of the manuscript for review plus the number of days past the deadline, the reviewer’s next personal submission to the journal will be held in editorial limbo for twice as long before it is sent for review. To illustrate, consider a reviewer who is given three weeks to review and turns his review in two weeks after the deadline. The total review time for this reviewer is five weeks. The punishment is 10 weeks, meaning that his next submission sits in the editorial office for ten weeks before being sent out for review. Journals reward timely reviewers by sending their manuscripts out for review as soon as they come in, and if accepted, by pushing their papers high up into the publication queue.

Would this work?

(Thanks Mason for the tip.)

Comments

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    Mason Inman said:

    Hauser co-authored this with Ernst Fehr, an experimental economist, and it’s not too surprising that the two of them would come up with something like this. Hauser has his book, Moral Minds, all about the evolution of morality, and Fehr does studies on how punishment—or the threat of it—affects cooperation.

    Now we need some kind of incentive system to tackle the really big problems, like global warming. At least a couple economists have been thinking of innovative ways of encouraging people to cooperate in this arena, too. Maybe Hauser and Fehr have some ideas about this, too.

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