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 ”https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4409911c-37df-11dd-aabb-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1">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.”