According to an editorial in last week’s Science, Pfizer recently filed a motion in a federal court here in Massachusetts to get the New England Journal of Medicine to fork over the confidential reviews of papers it’s published about some of Pfizer’s drugs. Plaintiffs are suing Pfizer, claiming that its COX-2 inhibitor drugs caused heart disease and other health problems. So the drug giant wants to dig through the reviewers’ reports in hopes of finding something that will help its case.

Don Kennedy, Science’s chief editor, says that doing away with confidentiality in peer review would undermine the integrity of peer review and would go against the public interest of having a fair assessment of scientific and medical research. What do you think? Some have argued that reviewers’ reports should be made public after a specific period of time post-publication.

An NN blogger, Martin Fenner, has weighed in, saying that we should resist the temptation “to move the scientific argument from the editorial office to the courtroom” or else “the peer review process and the way we communicate science will never be the same again.”