I haven’t yet had the pleasure of going through the peer review process but my wife has been trying to get a paper published for the last three years – a time period that is perfectly normal for a medical science paper – and she must have gone through at least a dozen or so final drafts of the paper.
Wasting time on my Twitter account a few days ago I came across that explains why peer review can take as long as it does and why it can also be frustrating for researchers.
Now, scientists and editors are taking alternative approaches to tackle some of the pervasive problems with traditional peer review and put the “scientific” back into scientific publishing. They include enabling authors to carry reviews from one journal to another, posting reviewer comments alongside the published paper, or running the traditional peer review process simultaneously with a public review.
“We thought that it’s time to change the atmosphere of how we communicate scientific knowledge,” says Idan Segev, a co-founder of Frontiers, one of a handful of journals cropping up that aim to better this system that most consider essential to the scientific community.
I passed it along to my former Duke Health Policy Professor, Don Taylor, and he gives his take over on his fantastic – one of the best sources on the net for analysis of American healthcare reform.
Peer review is the process through which researchers review one another’s work in order to determine whose paper is published in a given journal. The better the journal, the more competition for space. Here is an of peer review, or more directly, a piece noting the problems of peer review.
I think that peer review is probably best understood as the least worst way to determine what papers are published (there are problems, but science/research is quite conservative about changes of any type). I think the two changes I would most like to see would be (1) ending anonymous review; the writers of the paper and the reviewers should know who wrote/reviewed the paper; and (2) the reviews of published papers should be made available via the web so that researchers could see clearly the dialogue and discussion (many times best understood as negotiation) between authors, reviewers and editors over what is published.
Anonymity in peer review (and the internet) mean that people do not have to take responsibility for their words in a way that harms discourse, be it in scientific journals, blogs, comments on news stories, etc.
H/T to Damjan Denoble, one of my former students, for pointing me to this. He also writes asiahealthcareblog.
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