Opinion: We Must Demand Evidence of Peer Review
Peer review varies in quality and thoroughness. Making it publicly available could improve it.
ISTOCK, TEMMUZCAN
By Nikolai Slavov | May 21, 2018
Have you read a paper and thought: “How could peer reviews support the publication of such a paper?” I have. More than once. Other times, I have read fascinating papers outside of my field and wondered what the concerns of the experts who peer reviewed the study were. What important caveats am I missing?
Sometimes, I am lucky and find the answers to such questions: A few publications, including those from EMBO Press and eLife, publish the peer reviews alongside the papers. Reading such peer reviews has provided an additional dimension of appreciating and understanding the experiments and the findings, especially when I am not very familiar with the topic. But for most other journals I cannot access the peer reviews that supported a paper’s publication because most journals hide them.
How do we know that a journal conducts peer review? For most journals, the evidence is limited to our anecdotal experiences with the manuscripts that we review ourselves or that we and our friends have submitted. For me this evidence is mixed. I know of manuscripts that have been thoughtfully reviewed and manuscripts that have undergone very expedited peer review or no peer review at all before appearing in the most prestigious journals. This anecdotal evidence is rather weak. If you ask me to substantiate it, I have to refer you to a friend who may or may not be willing to tell you that his or her paper was barely peer reviewed. It is a huge problem that the evidence for such a centrally important process is hidden from public view.
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READ MORE HERE: The Scientist
