On scientific review
If you are a scientist, from time to time you hear a discussion about Open Access or Impact Factors… You for sure have your opinion on those “hot topics”. Now, is anybody ever thinking about how unfair the peer review procedure is? The reviewer always knows who wrote the paper he is reviewing, and I am sure quite often people who should do not refuse. Isn’t reviewing somebody’s paper the best way to get to them? And you will never know, because the reviewer remains anonymous. I am leaving alone the fact how often reviewers know little about the subject and ask really….. trivial questions.
Now, there are two possible ways to change the peer review process. My favorite would be to make it double blind- reviewer doesn’t know whose paper he is reviewing and the author doesn’t know who reviewed his manuscript. Sounds fair to me. But recently discussing it with my husband, he came up with another idea- the double-open peer review. Scientists prepare manuscript and simply put it out to the open discussion by everybody who cares. Of course if you ever read all the comments to news stories on any news web page, you realize that the discussion to be constructive needs to be somehow moderated. Moderated, not censored! I cannot think of simply making that type of open review happen, but I like the idea.
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The thing I had in my mind is that as long as you won’t get a green light from the reviewer your work won’t be published. So what is being published is a final version after many back and forth rounds of discussion with reviewer. In fact it’s more reviewer’s version (his/her point of view on the topic) represented in the published article.
My suggestion was that the reviewing process should be restricted to simple “OK, there is something to it, lets discuss” or “no, it’s not a science at all or there are critical errors in procedures or math” choice. And then the original version should be published and there should be discussion held which would allow the author to defend his statements, assumptions and results.
Of course I understand problems related to the fact that people usually read only first paragraph and that half of them would skip discussion part. But it can be solved by putting final discussion conclusions first in the publication if in course of discussion author admits that his research does not hold up.
Comment by Tomasz Korwel — March 28, 2008 @ 6:16 pm