Revolutionizing peer review?

Discussing the Peer Review Process

Piotr Bregestovski

Recently, editorial board of the "Nature Neuroscience" initiated a discussion concerning the problem of peer review (Nat. Neurosci. 8, 397, 2005). Generally the peer review process is a good way of pre-selection of manuscripts (MS). Development of desktop publishing eased the preparing of text, composing figures, tables etc., allowing many parts of texts, particularly Methods" to be just copied-pasted" from the previous publications. These technological achievements along with continuous growth of research labs resulted in tremendous increase of submitted manuscripts. One of particularly pressing factors is the use of amount of publications as a decisive criterion as a convenient proxy for scientific achievements in decisions on funding, hiring and promotion" (Nat.Neurosci. 8, 397, 2005).

In addition to "preselection", the peer review process is called to play another role offering the opportunity to improve the manuscript’s quality (probably the most important feature of this system). Careful critical analysis and suggestions of referees allow researchers (particularly young ones) to re-write their presentations in more clear way, with better illustrations and argumentations. It would be difficult to find efficient alternative system. New principles for its revolutionizing" (if necessary) have to be carefully prepared. Revolutions always contain two sides of medal". Very often the negative side could exhibit high dominance and unpredictable consequences.

However, the peer review" system needs modifications. In the present state it has, in my opinion, one rule that is particularly difficult to accept. This rule is a anonymous referees", which:

(i) put authors of MSs and reviewers in non-adequate positions;

(ii) decrease a quality of reviews, potentially allowing writing a rapid revision even without deep analysis of MSs;

(iii) potentially allows to use a situation of interests conflicts" during estimation of MSs quality.

In a majority of journals the name of referee is carefully protected from authors. It is difficult to find out the origin of this principle. It is also difficult to find an objective explanation and support for this rule. One member of editorial board (being personally for the open procedure of peer reviewing) rises suggestions that: this may stimulate conflicts between scientists working in close fields" and this may repellent young scientists from the process of reviewing MSs written by known scientists"….

However, more careful analysis of this problem clearly rejects or put to minimum this argumentation. Moreover, our preliminary investigation of the problem whether the process of peer reviewing have to be open or closed?" demonstrated that a vast majority of scientists strongly support a system of open reviewing.
This process would:

(i) put scientists in equal position;

(ii) reviewers would never write a critical comments containing just few general sentences.

In conclusion, the "peer reviewing" system is important and very useful not only for selection of submitted MSs, but also for improving quality of papers. However, the process should be open. At least this question worth to discuss openly with a wide audience of researchers.