Stifling innnovation or filtering for excellence?
An article in the Financial Times, Science stifled? Why peer review is under pressure (11 June 2008), reports various recent criticisms of the peer-review system, including a letter to the newspaper by 25 distinguished scientists calling for a "global fund to support inspired scientists, free of peer review"; news of a Royal Society pilot scheme for a “blue skies” research fund, to avoid the "constraints of conventional peer review by using a generalist panel to consider proposals from any field, on the basis of their novelty and potential to open up new areas of science and technology"; and in the announcement of this year's Grand Challenges programme of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Tachi Yamada, the foundation's head of global health, is cited as saying "We've got to get around peer review – it’s anathema to innovation. Innovation has no peers, by definition.”
The Financial Times article goes on to identify various innovations in the peer-review process itself, being tried or in normal use by various publications. Scientists themselves, however, choose to publish in the highest quality journals rather than on the basis of their peer-review systems. Linda Miller, US Executive Editor of Nature, is quoted in the article:
Linda Miller, executive editor of Nature, agrees that scientists continue to seek publication in prestigious journals to enhance their own standing. They also concentrate on reading the best-regarded ones, precisely because their time is precious. “You want to be directed, to use the best journals as a filtering device,” she says. “I have been an editor for more than 20 years and I have handled a lot of papers. Every single one has been improved by peer review.”
The article concludes that "Peer review may not be immortal, and may be experimenting with different forms, but it looks set to guard the gates of research for some time to come."
Comments
I don't quite understand this. The first paragraph talks about peer review in grant applications, and the second talks about it in the review of manuscripts. Aren't these two rather different things?
On peer review of grant applications, surely one way to encourage creativity is to focus on the applicant, rather than the proposed work, and then leave them to get on with it. This is the money I'm on now (thanks to the Academy of Finland), and the ERC grants should serve a similar function.
Posted by: Bob O'H | June 25, 2008 08:35 PM
I agree with you that the two systems of peer-review (grant applications and submitted manuscripts) are broadly different, in that one process is attempting to define a project likely to be fruitful, whereas the other is assessing a reported result and conclusion, as you point out, Bob. However, there are similarities, in that the journal peer-review process has often been accused of leading to originality and ideas being suppressed (rejected), and the "status quo" being maintained. And the FT article is citing various people and organisations that think the standard grant peer-review system is also stifling innovative thinking in favour of tried-and-true paths which don't allow any "breaking out of the box".
In the post here I discussed a couple of aspects of the FT article, but the full piece at the link provides a more seamless account.
Posted by: Maxine | June 26, 2008 12:20 PM
I wonder if the approach to creative research is the wrong way round. For projects that aren't hugely expensive, wouldn't it make more sense to make the funding decisions locally? A central funding agency is going to have more difficulty assessing the quality of candidates and their applications. Of course, for expensive projects this won't work.
Posted by: Bob O'H | June 26, 2008 01:20 PM