Trish Groves
A recipe for good peer review
Improving peer review depends on making its human aspects more humane. Journals need to ask the right reviewers to review the right articles, help them to do it quickly and thoroughly, make them feel happy to sign their reports, thank them, tell them how they did, and encourage wide recognition of what’s too often a thankless task.
Erik Sandewall
A hybrid system of peer review
Traditional peer review serves two purposes: to give feedback to the authors, helping them to improve their manuscript; and to control the quality of published articles. I believe that more value can be obtained by incorporating an open element in the peer-review system.
Brenda Riley
Database publication presents unique challenges for the peer reviewer
The reader of a scientific paper in a high-quality journal knows that the information has been vetted by a formal process of peer review, moderated by editors. But the face of publishing is changing, and peer review of databases is becoming an increasingly important facet of scientific data curation. The Signaling Gateway’s molecule pages represent an important, innovative experiment in applying models of peer review developed in journals to the much newer world of scientific databases.
Thomas DeCoursey
Should authors be told who their reviewers are?
The goal of any change in the peer review system must be to improve the quality of review, where quality is determined by two distinct functions: filtering manuscripts for publication in a given journal; and making constructive suggestions on how the manuscript or study could be improved. Would open review (in which reviewers sign their reviews) accomplish this goal? I have experienced several cases of open review, intentional and unintentional, with mixed results.
Chris Anderson
Scientific publishers should let their online readers become reviewers.
Who are the peers in peer review? In journals such as Nature, they usually have a PhD and work in a field relevant to the paper under consideration. If they are academics, they may be tenured professors, usually people on a relatively short list of experts who have agreed to review papers. This is a little élitist, but credentials such as PhDs and tenure are given in part to reward those things – experience, insight, brains and the respect of other researchers – that also make for wise advice. The process is not perfect, for reasons ranging from cronyism to capriciousness, yet long experience has shown it to be better than the alternatives.
Elizabeth Wager
Analysing the purpose of peer review.
Most people accept that peer review is enormously valuable and should be maintained and protected, but few agree on what purpose it serves. Science publishing, even at its simplest, involves complex interactions between researchers (authors), journal editors, reviewers and readers. It is a subtle form of human behaviour that could furnish the raw material for dozens of sociology theses. And when academic endeavour gets mixed up with commercial interests, things get even more complicated.
David Ozonoff
Researchers need reviewers to check their stats.
Statistical methods are widely used in many areas of natural science, especially in my field of research, epidemiology. Although statistical procedures are often viewed as a black art, or as a black box, they are not limited to specialists. With today’s computing power and software, researchers can and do use computationally intensive methods of great complexity, often leading to the use of techniques that are more sophisticated and powerful than necessary. Many researchers have trouble interpreting the results, or interpret them incorrectly. Clearly, this is a matter for peer review.
Thomas Koop and Ulrich Pöschl
The editors of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics explain their journal’s approach.
Recent high-profile cases of scientific fraud have fuelled the discussion of scientific quality control. A problem of similar, if not greater, importance is the large proportion of carelessly prepared scientific papers that dilute rather than enhance scientific knowledge. Both problems indicate shortcomings in the traditional peer-review system. Many scientists and publishers believe that peer review remains the best available approach for quality assurance, but requests for improvements are commonplace.
John Moore
Even reviewed literature can be cherry-picked to support any argument.
The research community understands that scientific information that has not been peer reviewed should not be taken seriously. As scientists, we discriminate between what is put out on blogs or in press releases and what is published in the formal scientific literature. We also know the difference between a peer-reviewed primary paper or review, and an unreviewed letter to the editor or opinion piece. In other words, we understand the peer-review system, and use it as a filter to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Herbert Van de Sompel
What functions do we take for granted in print?
The Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team at the research library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory conducts research on various aspects of scholarly communication in the digital age, including peer review. Our research attempts simultaneously to analyse properties of the existing review system, and to formulate feasible alternatives.