Peer review – issues, limitations, and future development

Abstract

Peer review is almost universally seen as the crux of scientific journal publishing. The role of peer reviewers is (1) to help avoid unnecessary errors in the published article, and (2) to judge publication-worthiness (in the journal that arranges for the review). This happens. Sometimes. But the notion of peer review is rather vague, and since most of it is anonymous, it is very difficult – arguably impossible – for researchers to know if the articles they read have been reliably peer reviewed and which criteria have been used to come to the decision to accept for publication. On top of that, peer review is very expensive. Not the peer review itself, as it is mostly done by researchers without being paid for it, but the process as arranged by publishers. This has several underlying causes, but it is clear that the actual cost of technically publishing an article is but a fraction of the average APC (Article Processing Charge) income or per-article subscription revenues publishers routinely realize. Some (e.g. Richard Smith, ex-Editor of the British Medical Journal) advocate abolishing peer review altogether. This is certainly not without merit, but even without abolishing it, there are ways to make peer review more reliable and transparent, and much cheaper to the scientific community.

“Let the community decide”? The vision and reality of soundness-only peer review in open-access mega-journals

“…There is also evidence that researchers are increasingly aware of the shortcomings of peer review (Ware and Mabe, 2015). Only 32 per cent of researchers think that peer review as currently practised is the best system that can be achieved (Sense About Science, 2009), reflecting authors' awareness of the various limitations and problems identified in the literature, such as bias in the review process (based on a range of factors including gender, nationality and prestige) (Lee et al, 2013), inconsistency among reviewers (Blackburn and Hakel, 2006), the slow and expensive nature of the process (Research Information Network, 2015;Smith, 2006) and the questionable predictive validity of judgements of significance (Bornmann, 2011;Velterop, 2015). Researchers are aware that the importance placed by publishers on the journal impact factor ( JIF), which is based on citation counts of articles published in the journal, may provide motivation for editors to publish only those articles that are likely to accrue high numbers of citations (Pulverer, 2013).…”

Gestão editorial: tendências e desafios na transição para a ciência aberta

“…Assim, torna-se cada vez mais difícil obter boas revisões dentro dos prazos preconizados pelos periódicos -e desejados pelos autores (NASSI-CALÓ, 2015). Jan Velterop, ademais, alerta para o fato de que o selo "peer reviewed" pode diminuir o saudável e necessário ceticismo científico que todo pesquisador deve ter ao ler um artigo, e não simplesmente aceitar tudo o que está escrito apenas porque foi "avaliado pelos pares" (VELTEROP, 2015).…”

In Time: Publons Busca Atrair Pareceristas E Aperfeiçoar a Avaliação Por Pares

“…Peer review, one of the pillars of scholarly communication, has been undergoing a transition moment toward greater reliability, transparency and accountability. 1 …”