Association of American Geologists and Naturalists
Washington, D.C., office of the AAAS
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the betterment of all humanity. It is the world's largest general scientific society, with over 120,000 members, and is the publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science.
History
Creation
The American Association for the Advancement of Science was created on September 20, 1848, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was a reformation of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists. The society chose William Charles Redfield as their first president
because he had proposed the most comprehensive plans for the
organization. According to the first constitution which was agreed to at
the September 20 meeting, the goal of the society was to promote
scientific dialogue in order to allow for greater scientific
collaboration.
By doing so the association aimed to use resources to conduct science
with increased efficiency and allow for scientific progress at a greater
rate.
The association also sought to increase the resources available to the
scientific community through active advocacy of science. There were
only 78 members when the AAAS was formed. As a member of the new scientific body, Matthew Fontaine Maury, USN was one of those who attended the first 1848 meeting.
At a meeting held on Friday afternoon, September 22, 1848,
Redfield presided, and Matthew Fontaine Maury gave a full scientific
report on his Wind and Current Charts. Maury stated that hundreds of ship navigators were now sending abstract logs of their voyages to the United States Naval Observatory. He added, "Never before was such a corps of observers known."
But, he pointed out to his fellow scientists, his critical need was for
more "simultaneous observations." "The work," Maury stated, "is not
exclusively for the benefit of any nation or age." The minutes of the
AAAS meeting reveal that because of the universality of this "view on
the subject, it was suggested whether the states of Christendom might
not be induced to cooperate with their Navies in the undertaking; at
least so far as to cause abstracts of their log-books and sea journals
to be furnished to Matthew F. Maury, USN, at the Naval Observatory at
Washington."
William Barton Rogers, professor at the University of Virginia
and later founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offered
a resolution: "Resolved that a Committee of five be appointed to
address a memorial to the Secretary of the Navy, requesting his further
aid in procuring for Matthew Maury the use of the observations of
European and other foreign navigators, for the extension and perfecting
of his charts of winds and currents." The resolution was adopted and, in
addition to Rogers, the following members of the association were
appointed to the committee: Professor Joseph Henry of Washington;
Professor Benjamin Peirce of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Professor James
H. Coffin of Easton, Pennsylvania, and Professor Stephen Alexander of
Princeton, New Jersey. This was scientific cooperation, and Maury went back to Washington with great hopes for the future.
In 1850, the first female members were accepted, they were:
astronomer Maria Mitchell, entomologist Margaretta Morris, and science
educator Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps.
Growth and Civil War dormancy
By 1860, membership increased to over 2,000. The AAAS became dormant during the American Civil War; their August 1861 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, was postponed indefinitely after the outbreak of the first major engagement of the war at Bull Run. The AAAS did not become a permanent casualty of the war.
In 1866, Frederick Barnard presided over the first meeting of the resurrected AAAS at a meeting in New York City.
Following the revival of the AAAS, the group had considerable growth.
The AAAS permitted all people, regardless of scientific credentials, to
join. The AAAS did, however, institute a policy of granting the title of
"Fellow of the AAAS"
to well-respected scientists within the organization. The years of
peace brought the development and expansion of other scientific-oriented
groups. The AAAS's focus on the unification of many fields of science
under a single organization was in contrast to the many new science
organizations founded to promote a single discipline. For example, the American Chemical Society, founded in 1876, promotes chemistry.
In 1863, the US Congress established the National Academy of Sciences,
another multidisciplinary sciences organization. It elects members
based on recommendations from colleagues and the value of published
works.
Advocacy
Alan I. Leshner,
AAAS CEO from 2001 until 2015, published many op-ed articles discussing
how many people integrate science and religion in their lives. He has
opposed the insertion of non-scientific content, such as creationism or intelligent design, into the scientific curriculum of schools.
In December 2006, the AAAS adopted an official statement on climate change,
in which they stated, "The scientific evidence is clear: global climate
change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing
threat to society....The pace of change and the evidence of harm have
increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now."
In February 2007, the AAAS used satellite images to document human rights abuses in Burma.
The next year, AAAS launched the Center for Science Diplomacy to
advance both science and the broader relationships among partner
countries, by promoting science diplomacy and international scientific cooperation.
In 2012, AAAS published op-eds,
held events on Capitol Hill and released analyses of the U.S. federal
research-and-development budget, to warn that a budget sequestration
would have severe consequences for scientific progress.
Sciences
AAAS covers various areas
of sciences and engineering. It has twelve sections, each with a
committee and its chair. These committees are also entrusted with the
annual evaluation and selection of Fellows. The sections are:
The most recent Constitution of the AAAS, enacted on January 1, 1973,
establishes that the governance of the AAAS is accomplished through
four entities: a President, a group of administrative officers, a
Council, and a Board of Directors.
Presidents
Individuals elected to the presidency of the AAAS hold a three-year term in a unique way. The first year is spent as President-elect, the second as President and the third as Chairperson of the Board of Directors. In accordance with the convention followed by the AAAS, presidents are referenced by the year in which they left office.
Geraldine Richmond is the President of AAAS for 2015–16; Phillip Sharp is the Board Chair; and Barbara A. Schaal is the President-Elect. Each took office on the last day of the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting in February 2015. On the last day of the 2016 AAAS Annual Meeting, February 15, 2016, Richmond will become the Chair, Schaal will become the President, and a new President-Elect will take office.
Past presidents of AAAS have included some of the most important
scientific figures of their time. Among them: explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell (1888); astronomer and physicist Edward Charles Pickering (1912); anthropologist Margaret Mead (1975); and biologist Stephen Jay Gould (2000).
There
are three classifications of high-level administrative officials that
execute the basic, daily functions of the AAAS. These are the executive officer, the treasurer and then each of the AAAS's section secretaries. The current CEO of AAAS and executive publisher of Science magazine is Rush D. Holt.
The
Council is composed of the members of the Board of Directors, the
retiring section chairmen, elected delegates and affiliated foreign
council members. Among the elected delegates there are always at least
two members from the National Academy of Sciences
and one from each region of the country. The President of the AAAS
serves as the Chairperson of the Council. Members serve the Council for a
term of three years.
The council meets annually to discuss matters of importance to
the AAAS. They have the power to review all activities of the
Association, elect new fellows, adopt resolutions, propose amendments to
the Association's constitution and bylaws, create new scientific
sections, and organize and aid local chapters of the AAAS. The Council
recently has new additions to it from different sections which include
many youngsters as well. John Kerry of Chicago is the youngest American
in the council and Akhil Ennamsetty of India is the youngest foreign
council member.
Board of directors
The
board of directors is composed of a chairperson, the president, and the
president-elect along with eight elected directors, the executive
officer of the association and up to two additional directors appointed
by elected officers. Members serve a four-year term except for directors
appointed by elected officers, who serve three-year terms.
The current chairman is Gerald Fink,
Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor at Whitehead Institute, MIT. Fink
will serve in the post until the end of the 2016 AAAS Annual Meeting, 15 February 2016. (The chairperson is always the immediate past-president of AAAS.)
The board of directors has a variety of powers and
responsibilities. It is charged with the administration of all
association funds, publication of a budget, appointment of
administrators, proposition of amendments, and determining the time and
place of meetings of the national association. The board may also speak
publicly on behalf of the association. The board must also regularly
correspond with the council to discuss their actions.
AAAS Fellows
The AAAS council elects every year, its members who are distinguished scientifically, to the grade of fellow (FAAAS).
Election to AAAS is an honor bestowed by their peers and elected
fellows are presented with a certificate and rosette pin. To limit the
effects and tolerance of sexual harassment in the sciences, starting 15
October 2018, a Fellow's status can be revoked "in cases of proven
scientific misconduct, serious breaches of professional ethics, or when
the Fellow in the view of the AAAS otherwise no longer merits the status
of Fellow."
Meetings
Formal
meetings of the AAAS are numbered consecutively, starting with the
first meeting in 1848. Meetings were not held 1861–1865 during the American Civil War, and also 1942–1943 during World War II. Since 1946, one meeting has occurred annually, now customarily in February.
Awards and fellowships
Each year, the AAAS gives out a number of honorary awards, most of which focus on science communication,
journalism, and outreach – sometimes in partnership with other
organizations. The awards recognize "scientists, journalists, and public
servants for significant contributions to science and to the public’s
understanding of science.” The awards are presented each year at the association's annual meeting.
In 1996, AAAS launched the EurekAlert! website, an editorially independent, non-profit news release distribution service covering all areas of science, medicine and technology. EurekAlert! provides news in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, and, from 2007, in Chinese.
Working staff journalists and freelancers who meet eligibility
guidelines can access the latest studies before publication and obtain
embargoed information in compliance with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission's Regulation Fair Disclosure policy.
By early 2018, more than 14,000 reporters from more than 90 countries
have registered for free access to embargoed materials. More than 5,000
active public information officers from 2,300 universities, academic
journals, government agencies, and medical centers are credentialed to
provide new releases to reporters and the public through the system.
In 1998, European science organizations countered Eurekalert! with a press release distribution service AlphaGalileo.
EurekAlert! has fallen under criticism for lack of press release standards and for generating churnalism.
Scholarly peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal, conference proceedings or as a book. The peer review helps the publisher (that is, the editor-in-chief, the editorial board or the program committee) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected.
Peer review
requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined)
field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial
review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or
inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the
significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated
among its contemporaries. Peer review is generally considered necessary
to academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals.
However, peer review does not prevent publication of invalid research, and there is little evidence that peer review improves the quality of published papers.
Scholarly peer review has been subject to a number of criticisms,
and various proposals for reforming the system have been suggested over
the years. Attempts to reform the peer review process originate among
others from the fields of metascience and journalology.
Reformers seek to increase the reliability and efficiency of the peer
review process and to provide it with a scientific foundation. Alternatives to common peer review practices have been put to the test, in particular open peer review, where the comments are visible to readers, generally with the identities of the peer reviewers disclosed as well, e.g., F1000, eLife, BMJ, Sci and BioMed Central.
The first peer-reviewed publication might have been the Medical Essays and Observations published by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1731. The present-day peer-review system evolved from this 18th-century process, began to involve external reviewers in the mid-19th-century, and did not become commonplace until the mid-20th-century.
Peer review became a touchstone of the scientific method, but until the end of the 19th century was often performed directly by an editor-in-chief or editorial committee.
Editors of scientific journals at that time made publication decisions
without seeking outside input, i.e. an external panel of reviewers,
giving established authors latitude in their journalistic discretion.
For example, Albert Einstein's four revolutionary Annus Mirabilis papers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik were peer-reviewed by the journal's editor-in-chief, Max Planck, and its co-editor, Wilhelm Wien,
both future Nobel prize winners and together experts on the topics of
these papers. On a much later occasion, Einstein was severely critical
of the external review process, saying that he had not authorized the
editor in chief to show his manuscript "to specialists before it is
printed", and informing him that he would "publish the paper
elsewhere"—which he did, and in fact he later had to withdraw the
publication.
While some medical journals started to systematically appoint
external reviewers, it is only since the middle of the 20th century that
this practice has spread widely and that external reviewers have been
given some visibility within academic journals, including being thanked
by authors and editors. A 2003 editorial in Nature
stated that, in the early 20th century, "the burden of proof was
generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas." Nature itself instituted formal peer review only in 1967. Journals such as Science and the American Journal of Medicine increasingly relied on external reviewers in the 1950s and 1960s, in part to reduce the editorial workload.
In the 20th century, peer review also became common for science funding
allocations. This process appears to have developed independently from
that of editorial peer review.
Gaudet
provides a social science view of the history of peer review carefully
tending to what is under investigation, here peer review, and not only
looking at superficial or self-evident commonalities among inquisition,
censorship, and journal peer review. It builds on historical research by
Gould, Biagioli, Spier, and Rip. The first Peer Review Congress met in 1989.
Over time, the fraction of papers devoted to peer review has steadily
declined, suggesting that as a field of sociological study, it has been
replaced by more systematic studies of bias and errors.
In parallel with "common experience" definitions based on the study of
peer review as a "pre-constructed process", some social scientists have
looked at peer review without considering it as pre-constructed.
Hirschauer proposed that journal peer review can be understood as
reciprocal accountability of judgements among peers.
Gaudet proposed that journal peer review could be understood as a
social form of boundary judgement – determining what can be considered
as scientific (or not) set against an overarching knowledge system, and
following predecessor forms of inquisition and censorship.
Pragmatically, peer review refers to the work done during the screening of submitted manuscripts. This process encourages authors to meet the accepted standards
of their discipline and reduces the dissemination of irrelevant
findings, unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal
views. Publications that have not undergone peer review are likely to
be regarded with suspicion by academic scholars and professionals. Non-peer-reviewed work does not contribute, or contributes less, to the academic credit of scholar such as the h-index, although this heavily depends on the field.
Justification
It
is difficult for authors and researchers, whether individually or in a
team, to spot every mistake or flaw in a complicated piece of work. This
is not necessarily a reflection on those concerned, but because with a
new and perhaps eclectic subject, an opportunity for improvement may be
more obvious to someone with special expertise or who simply looks at it
with a fresh eye. Therefore, showing work to others increases the
probability that weaknesses will be identified and improved. For both
grant-funding and publication in a scholarly journal, it is also
normally a requirement that the subject is both novel and substantial.
The decision whether or not to publish a scholarly article, or
what should be modified before publication, ultimately lies with the
publisher (editor-in-chief or the editorial board)
to which the manuscript has been submitted. Similarly, the decision
whether or not to fund a proposed project rests with an official of the
funding agency. These individuals usually refer to the opinion of one or
more reviewers in making their decision. This is primarily for three
reasons:
Workload. A small group of editors/assessors cannot devote
sufficient time to each of the many articles submitted to many journals.
Miscellany of ideas. Were the editor/assessor to judge all submitted
material themselves, approved material would solely reflect their
opinion.
Limited expertise. An editor/assessor cannot be expected to be
sufficiently expert in all areas covered by a single journal or funding
agency to adequately judge all submitted material.
Reviewers are often anonymous and independent.
However, some reviewers may choose to waive their anonymity, and in
other limited circumstances, such as the examination of a formal
complaint against the referee, or a court order, the reviewer's identity
may have to be disclosed. Anonymity may be unilateral or reciprocal
(single- or double-blinded reviewing).
Since reviewers are normally selected from experts in the fields
discussed in the article, the process of peer review helps to keep some
invalid or unsubstantiated claims out of the body of published research
and knowledge. Scholars will read published articles outside their
limited area of detailed expertise, and then rely, to some degree, on
the peer-review process to have provided reliable and credible research
that they can build upon for subsequent or related research. Significant
scandal ensues when an author is found to have falsified the research
included in an article, as other scholars, and the field of study
itself, may have relied upon the invalid research.
In the case of proposed publications, the publisher (editor-in-chief or the editorial board, often with assistance of corresponding or associate editors) sends advance copies of an author's work or ideas to researchers or scholars who are experts
in the field (known as "referees" or "reviewers"). Communication is
normally by e-mail or through a web-based manuscript processing system
such as ScholarOne, Scholastica, or Open Journal Systems.
Depending on the field of study and on the specific journal, there are
usually one to three referees for a given article. For example, Springer states that there are two or three reviewers per article.
The peer-review process involves three steps:
Step 1: Desk evaluation
An
editor evaluates the manuscript to judge whether the paper will be
passed on journal referees. At this phase many articles receive a “desk
reject,” that is, the editor chooses not to pass along the article. The
authors may or may not receive a letter of explanation.
Desk rejection is intended to be a streamlined process so that
editors may move past nonviable manuscripts quickly and provide authors
with the opportunity to pursue a more suitable journal. For example, the
European Accounting Review
editors subject each manuscript to three questions to decide whether a
manuscript moves forward to referees: 1) Is the article a fit for the
journal's aims and scope, 2) is the paper content (e.g. literature
review, methods, conclusions) sufficient and does the paper make a
worthwhile contribution to the larger body of literature, and 3) does it
follow format and technical specifications? If “no” to any of these,
the manuscript receives a desk rejection.
Desk rejection rates vary by journal. For example, in 2017 researchers at the World Bank compiled rejection rates of several global economics journals; the desk rejection rate ranged from 21% (Economic Lacea) to 66% (Journal of Development Economics). The American Psychological Association
publishes rejection rates for several major publications in the field,
and although they do not specify whether the rejection is pre- or post-
desk evaluation, their figures in 2016 ranged from a low of 49% to a
high of 90%.
Step 2: External review
If
the paper is not desk rejected, the editors send the manuscript to the
referees, who are chosen for their expertise and distance from the
authors. At this point, referees may reject, accept without changes
(rare) or instruct the authors to revise and resubmit.
Reasons vary for acceptance of an article by editors, but Elsevier
published an article where three editors weigh in on factors that drive
article acceptance. These factors include whether the manuscript:
delivers “new insight into an important issue,” will be useful to
practitioners, advances or proposes a new theory, raises new questions,
has appropriate methods and conclusion, presents a good argument based
on the literature, and tells a good story. One editor notes that he
likes papers that he “wished he’d done” himself.
These referees each return an evaluation of the work to the
editor, noting weaknesses or problems along with suggestions for
improvement. Typically, most of the referees' comments are eventually
seen by the author, though a referee can also send 'for your eyes only' comments to the publisher; scientific journals
observe this convention almost universally. The editor then evaluates
the referees' comments, her or his own opinion of the manuscript before
passing a decision back to the author(s), usually with the referees'
comments.
Referees' evaluations usually include an explicit recommendation
of what to do with the manuscript or proposal, often chosen from options
provided by the journal or funding agency. For example, Nature recommends four courses of action:
to unconditionally accept the manuscript or the proposal,
to accept it in the event that its authors improve it in certain ways
to reject it, but encourage revision and invite re-submission
to reject it outright.
During this process, the role of the referees is advisory. The
editor(s) is typically under no obligation to accept the opinions of the
referees,
though he or she will most often do so. Furthermore, the referees in
scientific publication do not act as a group, do not communicate with
each other, and typically are not aware of each other's identities or
evaluations. Proponents argue that if the reviewers of a paper are
unknown to each other, the editor(s) can more easily verify the
objectivity of the reviews. There is usually no requirement that the
referees achieve consensus, with the decision instead often made by the editor(s) based on her best judgement of the arguments.
In situations where multiple referees disagree substantially
about the quality of a work, there are a number of strategies for
reaching a decision. The paper may be rejected outright, or the editor
may choose which reviewer's point the authors should address.
When a publisher receives very positive and very negative reviews for
the same manuscript, the editor will often solicit one or more
additional reviews as a tie-breaker. As another strategy in the case of
ties, the publisher may invite authors to reply to a referee's criticisms
and permit a compelling rebuttal to break the tie. If a publisher does
not feel confident to weigh the persuasiveness of a rebuttal, the
publisher may solicit a response from the referee who made the original
criticism. An editor may convey communications back and forth between
authors and a referee, in effect allowing them to debate a point.
Even in these cases, however, publishers do not allow multiple
referees to confer with each other, though each reviewer may often see
earlier comments submitted by other reviewers. The goal of the process
is explicitly not to reach consensus or to persuade anyone to change
their opinions, but instead to provide material for an informed
editorial decision. One early study regarding referee disagreement found
that agreement was greater than chance, if not much greater than
chance, on six of seven article attributes (e.g. literature review and
final recommendation to publish),
but this study was small and it was conducted on only one journal. At
least one study has found that reviewer disagreement is not common, but
this study is also small and on only one journal.
Traditionally, reviewers would often remain anonymous to the
authors, but this standard varies both with time and with academic
field. In some academic fields, most journals offer the reviewer the
option of remaining anonymous or not, or a referee may opt to sign a
review, thereby relinquishing anonymity. Published papers sometimes
contain, in the acknowledgments section, thanks to anonymous or named
referees who helped improve the paper. For example, Nature journals
provide this option.
Sometimes authors may exclude certain reviewers: one study conducted on the Journal of Investigative Dermatology found that excluding reviewers doubled the chances of article acceptance.
Some scholars are uncomfortable with this idea, arguing that it
distorts the scientific process. Others argue that it protects against
referees who are biased in some manner (e.g. professional rivalry,
grudges). In some cases, authors can choose referees for their manuscripts. mSphere,
an open-access journal in microbial science, has moved to this model.
Editor-in-Chief Mike Imperiale says this process is designed to reduce
the time it takes to review papers and permit the authors to choose the
most appropriate reviewers. But a scandal in 2015 shows how this choosing reviewers can encourage fraudulent reviews. Fake reviews were submitted to the Journal of the Renin-Angiotensin-Aldosterone System in the names of author-recommended reviewers, causing the journal to eliminate this option.
Step 3: Revisions
If
the manuscript has not been rejected during peer review, it returns to
the authors for revisions. During this phase, the authors address the
concerns raised by reviewers. Dr. William Stafford Noble offers ten
rules for responding to reviewers. His rules include:
"Provide an overview, then quote the full set of reviews”
“Be polite and respectful of all reviewers”
“Accept the blame”
“Make the response self-contained”
“Respond to every point raised by the reviewer”
“Use typography to help the reviewer navigate your response”
“Whenever possible, begin your response to each comment with a direct answer to the point being raised”
“When possible, do what the reviewer asks”
“Be clear about what changed relative to the previous version”
“If necessary, write the response twice” (i.e. write a version for “venting” but then write a version the reviewers will see)
Recruiting referees
At a journal or book publisher, the task of picking reviewers typically falls to an editor.
When a manuscript arrives, an editor solicits reviews from scholars or
other experts who may or may not have already expressed a willingness to
referee for that journal
or book division. Granting agencies typically recruit a panel or
committee of reviewers in advance of the arrival of applications.
Referees are supposed to inform the editor of any conflict of interests
that might arise. Journals or individual editors may invite a
manuscript's authors to name people whom they consider qualified to
referee their work. For some journals this is a requirement of
submission. Authors are sometimes also given the opportunity to name
natural candidates who should be disqualified, in which case they may be asked to provide justification (typically expressed in terms of conflict of interest).
Editors solicit author input in selecting referees because academic
writing typically is very specialized. Editors often oversee many
specialties, and can not be experts in all of them. But after an editor
selects referees from the pool of candidates, the editor typically is
obliged not to disclose the referees' identities to the authors, and in
scientific journals, to each other. Policies on such matters differ
among academic disciplines.
One difficulty with respect to some manuscripts is that, there may be
few scholars who truly qualify as experts, people who have themselves
done work similar to that under review. This can frustrate the goals of
reviewer anonymity and avoidance of conflicts of interest. Low-prestige
or local journals and granting agencies that award little money are
especially handicapped with regard to recruiting experts.
A potential hindrance in recruiting referees is that they are usually not paid, largely because doing so would itself create a conflict of interest.
Also, reviewing takes time away from their main activities, such as his
or her own research. To the would-be recruiter's advantage, most
potential referees are authors themselves, or at least readers, who know
that the publication system requires that experts donate their time. Serving as a referee can even be a condition of a grant, or professional association membership.
Referees have the opportunity to prevent work that does not meet
the standards of the field from being published, which is a position of
some responsibility. Editors are at a special advantage in recruiting a
scholar when they have overseen the publication of his or her work, or
if the scholar is one who hopes to submit manuscripts to that editor's
publishing entity in the future. Granting agencies, similarly, tend to
seek referees among their present or former grantees.
Peerage of Science
is an independent service and a community where reviewer recruitment
happens via Open Engagement: authors submit their manuscript to the
service where it is made accessible for any non-affiliated scientist,
and 'validated users' choose themselves what they want to review. The
motivation to participate as a peer reviewer comes from a reputation
system where the quality of the reviewing work is judged and scored by
other users, and contributes to user profiles. Peerage of Science does
not charge any fees to scientists, and does not pay peer reviewers.
Participating publishers however pay to use the service, gaining access
to all ongoing processes and the opportunity to make publishing offers
to the authors.
With independent peer review services the author usually retains
the right to the work throughout the peer review process, and may choose
the most appropriate journal to submit the work to.
Peer review services may also provide advice or recommendations on most
suitable journals for the work. Journals may still want to perform an
independent peer review, without the potential conflict of interest that
financial reimbursement may cause, or the risk that an author has
contracted multiple peer review services but only presents the most
favorable one.
An alternative or complementary system of performing peer review is for the author to pay for having it performed. Example of such service provider is Rubriq, which for each work assigns peer reviewers who are financially compensated for their efforts.
Different styles
Anonymous and attributed
For most scholarly publications, the identity of the reviewers is kept anonymised (also called "blind peer review"). The alternative, attributed peer review
involves revealing the identities of the reviewers. Some reviewers
choose to waive their right to anonymity, even when the journal's
default format is blind peer review.
In anonymous peer review, reviewers are known to the journal
editor or conference organiser but their names are not given to the
article's author. In some cases, the author's identity can also be
anonymised for the review process, with identifying information is
stripped from the document before review. The system is intended to
reduce or eliminate bias.
Some experts proposed blind review procedures for reviewing controversial research topics.
In double-blind peer review, which has been fashioned by sociology journals in the 1950s and remains more common in the social sciences and humanities than in the natural sciences, the identity of the authors is concealed from the reviewers ("blinded"), and vice versa, lest the knowledge of authorship or concern about disapprobation from the author bias their review.
Critics of the double-blind review process point out that, despite any
editorial effort to ensure anonymity, the process often fails to do so,
since certain approaches, methods, writing styles, notations, etc.,
point to a certain group of people in a research stream, and even to a
particular person.
In many fields of "big science", the publicly available operation schedules of major equipments, such as telescopes or synchrotrons,
would make the authors' names obvious to anyone who would care to look
them up. Proponents of double-blind review argue that it performs no
worse than single-blind, and that it generates a perception of fairness
and equality in academic funding and publishing.
Single-blind review is strongly dependent upon the goodwill of the
participants, but no more so than double-blind review with easily
identified authors.
As an alternative to single-blind and double-blind review,
authors and reviewers are encouraged to declare their conflicts of
interest when the names of authors and sometimes reviewers are known to
the other. When conflicts are reported, the conflicting reviewer can be
prohibited from reviewing and discussing the manuscript, or his or her
review can instead be interpreted with the reported conflict in mind;
the latter option is more often adopted when the conflict of interest is
mild, such as a previous professional connection or a distant family
relation. The incentive for reviewers to declare their conflicts of
interest is a matter of professional ethics and individual integrity.
Even when the reviews are not public, they are still a matter of record
and the reviewer's credibility depends upon how they represent
themselves among their peers. Some software engineering journals, such
as the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, use non-blind reviews with reporting to editors of conflicts of interest by both authors and reviewers.
The traditional anonymous peer review has been criticized for its
lack of accountability, the possibility of abuse by reviewers or by
those who manage the peer review process (that is, journal editors), its possible bias, and its inconsistency, alongside other flaws. Eugene Koonin, a senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, asserts that the system has "well-known ills" and advocates "open peer review".
Open peer review
In 1999, the open access journal Journal of Medical Internet Research
was launched, which from its inception decided to publish the names of
the reviewers at the bottom of each published article. Also in 1999, the
British Medical Journal moved to an open peer review system, revealing reviewers' identities to the authors but not the readers, and in 2000, the medical journals in the open access BMC series published by BioMed Central, launched using open peer review. As with the BMJ,
the reviewers' names are included on the peer review reports. In
addition, if the article is published the reports are made available
online as part of the "pre-publication history"'.
Several other journals published by the BMJ Group allow optional open peer review, as does PLoS Medicine, published by the Public Library of Science. The BMJ's Rapid Responses allows ongoing debate and criticism following publication.
In June 2006, Nature launched an experiment in parallel
open peer review: some articles that had been submitted to the regular
anonymous process were also available online for open, identified public
comment. The results were less than encouraging – only 5% of authors
agreed to participate in the experiment, and only 54% of those articles
received comments.
The editors have suggested that researchers may have been too busy to
take part and were reluctant to make their names public. The knowledge
that articles were simultaneously being subjected to anonymous peer
review may also have affected the uptake.
In February 2006, the journal Biology Direct was launched by BioMed Central,
adding another alternative to the traditional model of peer review. If
authors can find three members of the Editorial Board who will each
return a report or will themselves solicit an external review, the
article will be published. As with Philica, reviewers cannot suppress publication, but in contrast to Philica,
no reviews are anonymous and no article is published without being
reviewed. Authors have the opportunity to withdraw their article, to
revise it in response to the reviews, or to publish it without revision.
If the authors proceed with publication of their article despite
critical comments, readers can clearly see any negative comments along
with the names of the reviewers.
In the social sciences, there have been experiments with wiki-style, signed peer reviews, for example in an issue of the Shakespeare Quarterly.
In 2010, the BMJ began publishing signed reviewer's
reports alongside accepted papers, after determining that telling
reviewers that their signed reviews might be posted publicly did not
significantly affect the quality of the reviews.
In 2011, Peerage of Science,
an independent peer review service, was launched with several
non-traditional approaches to academic peer review. Most prominently,
these include the judging and scoring of the accuracy and justifiability
of peer reviews, and concurrent usage of a single peer review round by
several participating journals.
Starting in 2013 with the launch of F1000Research, some publishers have combined open peer review with postpublication peer review by using a versioned article system. At F1000Research,
articles are published before review, and invited peer review reports
(and reviewer names) are published with the article as they come in.
Author-revised versions of the article are then linked to the original.
A similar postpublication review system with versioned articles is used
by Science Open launched in 2014.
In 2014, Life implanted an open peer review system,
under which the peer-review reports and authors’ responses are
published as an integral part of the final version of each article.
Since 2016, Synlett
is experimenting with closed crowd peer review. The article under
review is sent to a pool of 80+ expert reviewers who then
collaboratively comment on the manuscript.
In an effort to address issues with the reproducibility of
research results, some scholars are asking that authors agree to share
their raw data as part of the peer review process.
As far back as 1962, for example, a number of psychologists have
attempted to obtain raw data sets from other researchers, with mixed
results, in order to reanalyze them. A recent attempt resulted in only
seven data sets out of fifty requests. The notion of obtaining, let
alone requiring, open data as a condition of peer review remains
controversial. In 2020 peer review lack of access to raw data led to article retractions in prestigious The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. Many journals now require access to raw data to be included in peer review.
Pre- and post-publication peer review
The
process of peer review is not restricted to the publication process
managed by academic journals. In particular, some forms of peer review
can occur before an article is submitted to a journal and/or after it is
published by the journal.
Pre-publication peer review
Manuscripts
are typically reviewed by colleagues before submission, and if the
manuscript is uploaded to preprint servers, such as ArXiv, BioRxiv or SSRN,
researchers can read and comment on the manuscript. The practice to
upload to preprint servers, and the activity of discussion heavily
depend on the field, and it allows an open pre-publication peer review.
The advantage of this method is speed and transparency of the review
process. Anyone can give feedback, typically in form of comments, and
typically not anonymously. These comments are also public, and can be
responded to, therefore author-reviewer communication is not restricted
to the typical 2–4 rounds of exchanges in traditional publishing. The
authors can incorporate comments from a wide range of people instead of
feedback from the typically 3–4 reviewers. The disadvantage is that a
far larger number of papers are presented to the community without any
guarantee on quality.
Post-publication peer review
After a manuscript is published, the process of peer review continues as publications are read, known as post-publication peer review. Readers will often send letters to the editor
of a journal, or correspond with the editor via an on-line journal
club. In this way, all "peers" may offer review and critique of
published literature. The introduction of the "epub
ahead of print" practice in many journals has made possible the
simultaneous publication of unsolicited letters to the editor together
with the original paper in the print issue.
A variation on this theme is open peer commentary, in
which commentaries from specialists are solicited on published articles
and the authors are invited to respond. Journals using this process
solicit and publish non-anonymous commentaries on the "target paper"
together with the paper, and with original authors' reply as a matter of
course. Open peer commentary was first implemented by the
anthropologist Sol Tax, who founded the journal Current Anthropology in 1957. The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published by Cambridge University Press, was founded by Stevan Harnad in 1978 and modeled on Current Anthropology's open peer commentary feature. Psycoloquy (1990–2002)
was based on the same feature, but this time implemented online. Since
2016 open peer commentary is also provided by the journal Animal Sentience.
In addition to journals hosting their own articles' reviews,
there are also external, independent websites dedicated to
post-publication peer-review, such as PubPeer which allows anonymous commenting of published literature and pushes authors to answer these comments. It has been suggested that post-publication reviews from these sites should be editorially considered as well. The megajournals F1000Research and ScienceOpen publish openly both the identity of the reviewers and the reviewer's report alongside the article.
Some journals use postpublication peer review as formal review
method, instead of prepublication review. This was first introduced in
2001, by Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP). More recently F1000Research and ScienceOpen were launched as megajournals with postpublication review as formal review method. At both ACP and F1000Research
peer reviewers are formally invited, much like at prepublication review
journals. Articles that pass peer review at those two journals are
included in external scholarly databases.
In 2006, a small group of UK academic psychologists launched Philica,
the instant online journal Journal of Everything, to redress many of
what they saw as the problems of traditional peer review. All submitted
articles are published immediately and may be reviewed afterwards. Any
researcher who wishes to review an article can do so and reviews are
anonymous. Reviews are displayed at the end of each article, and are
used to give the reader criticism or guidance about the work, rather
than to decide whether it is published or not. This means that reviewers
cannot suppress ideas if they disagree with them. Readers use reviews
to guide their reading, and particularly popular or unpopular work is
easy to identify.
Sci(ISSN 2413-4155)
from MDPI, a scholarly, open access journal which covers all research
fields and publishes reviews, regular research papers, communications,
and short notes, was established in March 2018 to open the "black box of
peer-review".
It subsequently adapted a more transparent workflow, post publication
public peer-review (P4R) advocating the maintenance of transparency and
scientific originality.
The P4R system in place from March 2019 until November 2020 promised
authors immediate visibility of their manuscripts on the journal’s
online platform after a brief and limited check of scientific soundness
and proper reporting and against plagiarism and offensive material. This
approach, however, was faced with some challenges, namely:
the extended manuscript processing time due to waiting to volunteers to come forward
certain refusal by authors to accept comments or reviews has been
noted in Sci, possibly fueled by the fact that the manuscript had been
published de facto already as part of the P4R strategy of
post-publication review
logistical mess, as the options of retraction or rejection are not
really available in P4R, where a highly problematic public naming and
shaming of a weak manuscript looks to be the only tool then available to
guard against lack of quality
the inability to include Sci as a P4R journal in Clarivate’s Web of
Science and Science Citation Index due to the generation of several DOIs
Therefore, the a switch to a hybrid workflow, P4R hybrid, was sought since November 2020.
Social media and informal peer review
Recent
research has called attention to the use of social media technologies
and science blogs as a means of informal, post-publication peer review,
as in the case of the #arseniclife (or GFAJ-1) controversy. In December 2010, an article published in Scienceexpress (the ahead-of-print version of Science) generated both excitement and skepticism, as its authors—led by NASA astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon—claimed
to have discovered and cultured a certain bacteria that could replace
phosphorus with arsenic in its physiological building blocks. At the
time of the article's publication, NASA issued press statements
suggesting that the finding would impact the search for extraterrestrial
life, sparking excitement on Twitter under the hashtag #arseniclife, as
well as criticism from fellow experts who voiced skepticism via their
personal blogs. Ultimately, the controversy surrounding the article attracted media attention, and one of the most vocal scientific critics—Rosemary Redfield—formally published in July 2012 regarding her and her colleagues' unsuccessful attempt to replicate the NASA scientists’ original findings.
Researchers following the impact of the #arseniclife case on
social media discussions and peer review processes concluded the
following:
Our results indicate that interactive online
communication technologies can enable members in the broader scientific
community to perform the role of journal reviewers to legitimize
scientific information after it has advanced through formal review
channels. In addition, a variety of audiences can attend to scientific
controversies through these technologies and observe an informal process
of post-publication peer review. (p 946)
Result-blind peer review
Studies which report a positive or statistically-significant result are far more likely to be published than ones which do not.
A counter-measure to this positivity bias is to hide or make
unavailable the results, making journal acceptance more like scientific grant agencies reviewing research proposals. Versions include:
Result-blind peer review or results blind peer review,
first proposed 1966: Reviewers receive an edited version of the
submitted paper which omits the results and conclusion section.
In a two-stage version, a second round of reviews or editorial judgment
is based on the full paper version, which was first proposed in 1977.
Conclusion-blind review, proposed by Robin Hanson
in 2007 extends this further asking all authors to submit a positive
and a negative version, and only after the journal has accepted the
article authors reveal which is the real version.
Pre-accepted articles or outcome-unbiased journals or advance publication review or registered reports or prior to results submission or early acceptance
extends study pre-registration to the point that journals accepted or
reject papers based on the version of the paper written before the
results or conclusions have been made (an enlarged study protocol), but
instead describes the theoretical justification, experimental design,
and statistical analysis. Only once the proposed hypothesis and
methodology have been accepted by reviewers, the authors would collect
the data or analyze previously collected data. A limited variant of a
pre-accepted article was The Lancet's
study protocol review from 1997–2015 reviewed and published randomized
trial protocols with a guarantee that the eventual paper would at least
be sent out to peer review rather than immediately rejected. For example, Nature Human Behaviour
has adopted the registered report format, as it “shift[s] the emphasis
from the results of research to the questions that guide the research
and the methods used to answer them”. The European Journal of Personality
defines this format: “In a registered report, authors create a study
proposal that includes theoretical and empirical background, research
questions/hypotheses, and pilot data (if available). Upon submission,
this proposal will then be reviewed prior to data collection, and if
accepted, the paper resulting from this peer-reviewed procedure will be
published, regardless of the study outcomes.”
The following journals used result-blind peer review or pre-accepted articles:
The European Journal of Parapsychology, under Martin Johnson (who proposed a version of Registered Reports in 1974), began accepting papers based on submitted designs and then publishing them, from 1976 to 1993, and published 25 RRs total
The International Journal of Forecasting used opt-in result-blind peer review and pre-accepted articles from before 1986 through 1996/1997.
The journal Applied Psychological Measurement offered an opt-in "advance publication review" process from 1989–1996, ending use after only 5 papers were submitted.
The JAMA Internal Medicine
found in a 2009 survey that 86% of its reviewers would be willing to
work in a result-blind peer review process, and ran a pilot experiment
with a two-stage result-blind peer review, showing the unblinded step
benefited positive studies more than negatives. but the journal does not currently use result-blind peer review.
The Center for Open Science encourages using "Registered Reports" (pre-accepted articles)
beginning in 2013. As of October 2017, ~80 journals offer Registered
Reports in general, have had special issues of Registered Reports, or
limited acceptance of Registered Reports (e.g. replications only)
including AIMS Neuroscience, Cortex, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Social Psychology, & Comparative Political Studies
Comparative Political Studies published results of its
pilot experiment of 19 submissions of which 3 were pre-accepted in 2016.
the process worked well but submissions were weighted towards
quantitative experimental designs, and reduced the amount of 'fishing'
as submitters and reviewers focused on theoretical backing, substantive
importance of results, with attention to the statistical power
and implications of a null result, concluding that "we can clearly
state that this form of review lead to papers that were of the highest
quality. We would love to see a top journal adopt results-free review as
a policy, at very least allowing results-free review as one among
several standard submission options."
Criticism
Various editors have expressed criticism of peer review. In addition, a Cochrane review found little empirical evidence that peer review ensures quality in biomedical research,
while a second systematic review and meta-analysis found a need for
evidence-based peer review in biomedicine given the paucity of
assessment of the interventions designed to improve the process.
To an outsider, the anonymous, pre-publication peer review
process is opaque. Certain journals are accused of not carrying out
stringent peer review in order to more easily expand their customer
base, particularly in journals where authors pay a fee before
publication. Richard Smith, MD, former editor of the British Medical Journal,
has claimed that peer review is "ineffective, largely a lottery,
anti-innovatory, slow, expensive, wasteful of scientific time,
inefficient, easily abused, prone to bias, unable to detect fraud and
irrelevant; Several studies have shown that peer review is biased
against the provincial and those from low- and middle-income countries;
Many journals take months and even years to publish and the process
wastes researchers' time. As for the cost, the Research Information
Network estimated the global cost of peer review at £1.9 billion in
2008."
In addition, Australia's Innovative Research Universities
group (a coalition of seven comprehensive universities committed to
inclusive excellence in teaching, learning and research in Australia)
has found that "peer review disadvantages researchers in their early
careers, when they rely on competitive grants to cover their salaries,
and when unsuccessful funding applications often mark the end of a
research idea".
Low-end distinctions in articles understandable to all peers
John Ioannidis
argues that since the exams and other tests that people pass on their
way from "layman" to "expert" focus on answering the questions in time
and in accordance with a list of answers, and not on making precise
distinctions (the latter of which would be unrecognizable to experts of
lower cognitive precision), there is as much individual variation in the
ability to distinguish causation from correlation
among "experts" as there is among "laymen". Ioannidis argues that as a
result, scholarly peer review by many "experts" allows only articles
that are understandable at a wide range of cognitive precision levels
including very low ones to pass, biasing publications towards favoring
articles that infer causation from correlation while mislabelling
articles that make the distinction as "incompetent overestimation of one's ability"
on the side of the authors because some of the reviewing "experts" are
cognitively unable to distinguish the distinction from alleged rationalization
of specific conclusions. It is argued by Ioannidis that this makes peer
review a cause of selective publication of false research findings
while stopping publication of rigorous criticism thereof, and that
further post-publication review repeats the same bias by selectively
retracting the few rigorous articles that may have made it through
initial pre-publication peer review while letting the low-end ones that
confuse correlation and causation remain in print.
Peer review and trust
Researchers have peer reviewed manuscripts prior to publishing them in a variety of ways since the 18th century.
The main goal of this practice is to improve the relevance and accuracy
of scientific discussions. Even though experts often criticize peer
review for a number of reasons, the process is still often considered
the "gold standard" of science.
Occasionally however, peer review approves studies that are later found
to be wrong and rarely deceptive or fraudulent results are discovered
prior to publication.
Thus, there seems to be an element of discord between the ideology
behind and the practice of peer review. By failing to effectively
communicate that peer review is imperfect, the message conveyed to the
wider public is that studies published in peer-reviewed journals are
"true" and that peer review protects the literature from flawed science.
A number of well-established criticisms exist of many elements of peer
review.
In the following we describe cases of the wider impact inappropriate
peer review can have on public understanding of scientific literature.
Multiple examples across several areas of science find that
scientists elevated the importance of peer review for research that was
questionable or corrupted. For example, climate change deniers have published studies in the Energy and Environment
journal, attempting to undermine the body of research that shows how
human activity impacts the Earth's climate. Politicians in the United
States who reject the established science of climate change have then
cited this journal on several occasions in speeches and reports.
At times, peer review has been exposed as a process that was orchestrated for a preconceived outcome. The New York Times gained access to confidential peer review documents for studies sponsored by the National Football League (NFL) that were cited as scientific evidence that brain injuries do not cause long-term harm to its players.
During the peer review process, the authors of the study stated that
all NFL players were part of a study, a claim that the reporters found
to be false by examining the database used for the research.
Furthermore, The Times noted that the NFL sought to legitimize
the studies" methods and conclusion by citing a "rigorous, confidential
peer-review process" despite evidence that some peer reviewers seemed
"desperate" to stop their publication. Recent research has also
demonstrated that widespread industry funding for published medical
research often goes undeclared and that such conflicts of interest are
not appropriately addressed by peer review.
Another problem that peer review fails to catch is ghostwriting,
a process by which companies draft articles for academics who then
publish them in journals, sometimes with little or no changes.
These studies can then be used for political, regulatory and marketing
purposes. In 2010, the US Senate Finance Committee released a report
that found this practice was widespread, that it corrupted the
scientific literature and increased prescription rates. Ghostwritten articles have appeared in dozens of journals, involving professors at several universities.
Just as experts in a particular field have a better understanding
of the value of papers published in their area, scientists are
considered to have better grasp of the value of published papers than
the general public and to see peer review as a human process, with human
failings, and that "despite its limitations, we need it. It is all we have, and it is hard to imagine how we would get along without it".
But these subtleties are lost on the general public, who are often
misled into thinking that published in a journal with peer review is the
"gold standard" and can erroneously equate published research with the
truth.
Thus, more care must be taken over how peer review, and the results of
peer-reviewed research, are communicated to non-specialist audiences;
particularly during a time in which a range of technical changes and a
deeper appreciation of the complexities of peer review are emerging. This will be needed as the scholarly publishing system has to confront wider issues such as retractions and replication or reproducibility "crisis'.
Views of peer review
Peer review is often considered integral to scientific discourse in one form or another. Its gatekeeping role is supposed to be necessary to maintain the quality of the scientific literature and avoid a risk of unreliable results, inability to separate signal from noise, and slow scientific progress.
Shortcomings of peer review have been met with calls for even
stronger filtering and more gatekeeping. A common argument in favor of
such initiatives is the belief that this filter is needed to maintain
the integrity of the scientific literature.
Calls for more oversight have at least two implications that are counterintuitive of what is known to be true scholarship.
The belief that scholars are incapable of evaluating the quality
of work on their own, that they are in need of a gatekeeper to inform
them of what is good and what is not.
The belief that scholars need a "guardian" to make sure they are doing good work.
Others argue
that authors most of all have a vested interest in the quality of a
particular piece of work. Only the authors could have, as Feynman (1974)
puts it, the "extra type of integrity that is beyond not lying, but
bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to
have when acting as a scientist." If anything, the current peer review
process and academic system could penalize, or at least fail to
incentivize, such integrity.
Instead, the credibility conferred by the "peer-reviewed" label could diminish what Feynman calls the culture of doubt necessary for science to operate a self-correcting, truth-seeking process. The effects of this can be seen in the ongoing replication crisis, hoaxes, and widespread outrage over the inefficacy of the current system.
It's common to think that more oversight is the answer, as peer
reviewers are not at all lacking in skepticism. But the issue is not the
skepticism shared by the select few who determine whether an article
passes through the filter. It is the validation, and accompanying lack
of skepticism, that comes afterwards.
Here again more oversight only adds to the impression that peer review
ensures quality, thereby further diminishing the culture of doubt and
counteracting the spirit of scientific inquiry.
Quality research - even some of our most fundamental scientific
discoveries - dates back centuries, long before peer review took its
current form.
Whatever peer review existed centuries ago, it took a different form
than it does in modern times, without the influence of large, commercial
publishing companies or a pervasive culture of publish or perish.
Though in its initial conception it was often a laborious and
time-consuming task, researchers took peer review on nonetheless, not
out of obligation but out of duty to uphold the integrity of their own
scholarship. They managed to do so, for the most part, without the aid
of centralised journals, editors, or any formalised or institutionalised
process whatsoever. Supporters of modern technology argue
that it makes it possible to communicate instantaneously with scholars
around the globe, make such scholarly exchanges easier, and restore peer
review to a purer scholarly form, as a discourse in which researchers
engage with one another to better clarify, understand, and communicate
their insights.
Such modern technology includes posting results to preprint servers, preregistration of studies, open peer review, and other open science practices.
In all these initiatives, the role of gatekeeping remains prominent, as
if a necessary feature of all scholarly communication, but critics
argue
that a proper, real-world implementation could test and disprove this
assumption; demonstrate researchers' desire for more that traditional
journals can offer; show that researchers can be entrusted to perform
their own quality control independent of journal-coupled review. Jon Tennant
also argues that the outcry over the inefficiencies of traditional
journals centers on their inability to provide rigorous enough scrutiny,
and the outsourcing of critical thinking to a concealed and
poorly-understood process. Thus, the assumption that journals and peer
review are required to protect scientific integrity seems to undermine
the very foundations of scholarly inquiry.
To test the hypothesis that filtering is indeed unnecessary to
quality control, many of the traditional publication practices would
need to be redesigned, editorial boards repurposed if not disbanded, and
authors granted control over the peer review of their own work. Putting
authors in charge of their own peer review is seen as serving a dual
purpose.
On one hand, it removes the conferral of quality within the traditional
system, thus eliminating the prestige associated with the simple act of
publishing. Perhaps paradoxically, the removal of this barrier might
actually result in an increase of the quality of published work, as it
eliminates the cachet of publishing for its own sake. On the other hand,
readers know that there is no filter so they must interpret anything
they read with a healthy dose of skepticism, thereby naturally restoring
the culture of doubt to scientific practice.
In addition to concerns about the quality of work produced by
well-meaning researchers, there are concerns that a truly open system
would allow the literature to be populated with junk and propaganda by
those with a vested interest in certain issues. A counterargument is
that the conventional model of peer review diminishes the healthy
skepticism that is a hallmark of scientific inquiry, and thus confers
credibility upon subversive attempts to infiltrate the literature.
Allowing such "junk" to be published could make individual articles
less reliable but render the overall literature more robust by fostering
a "culture of doubt".
Allegations of bias and suppression
The interposition of editors and reviewers between authors and readers may enable the intermediators to act as gatekeepers. Some sociologists of science argue that peer review makes the ability to publish susceptible to control by elites and to personal jealousy.
The peer review process may sometimes impede progress and may be biased against novelty.
A linguistic analysis of review reports suggests that reviewers focus
on rejecting the applications by searching for weak points, and not on
finding the high-risk/high-gain groundbreaking ideas that may be in the
proposal. Reviewers tend to be especially critical of conclusions that contradict their own views,
and lenient towards those that match them. At the same time,
established scientists are more likely than others to be sought out as
referees, particularly by high-prestige journals/publishers. As a
result, ideas that harmonize with the established experts' are more
likely to see print and to appear in premier journals than are
iconoclastic or revolutionary ones. This accords with Thomas Kuhn's well-known observations regarding scientific revolutions.
A theoretical model has been established whose simulations imply that
peer review and over-competitive research funding foster mainstream
opinion to monopoly.
Criticisms of traditional anonymous peer review allege that it
lacks accountability, can lead to abuse by reviewers, and may be biased
and inconsistent.
There have also been suggestions of gender bias in peer review, with male authors being likely to receive more favorable treatment.
However, a 2021 study found no evidence for such bias (and found that
in some respects female authors were treated more favourably).
Open access journals and peer review
Some
critics of open access (OA) journals have argued that, compared to
traditional subscription journals, open access journals might utilize
substandard or less formal peer review practices, and, as a consequence,
the quality of scientific work in such journals will suffer.
In a study published in 2012, this hypothesis was tested by evaluating
the relative "impact" (using citation counts) of articles published in
open access and subscription journals, on the grounds that members of
the scientific community would presumably be less likely to cite
substandard work, and that citation counts could therefore act as one
indicator of whether or not the journal format indeed impacted peer
review and the quality of published scholarship.
This study ultimately concluded that "OA journals indexed in Web of
Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and
quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for
journals funded by article processing charges," and the authors
consequently argue that "there is no reason for authors not to choose to
publish in OA journals just because of the ‘OA’ label.
Failures
Peer
review fails when a peer-reviewed article contains fundamental errors
that undermine at least one of its main conclusions and that could have
been identified by more careful reviewers. Many journals have no
procedure to deal with peer review failures beyond publishing letters to
the editor.
Peer review in scientific journals assumes that the article reviewed
has been honestly prepared. The process occasionally detects fraud, but
is not designed to do so. When peer review fails and a paper is published with fraudulent or otherwise irreproducible data, the paper may be retracted.
A 1998 experiment on peer review with a fictitious manuscript found
that peer reviewers failed to detect some manuscript errors and the
majority of reviewers may not notice that the conclusions of the paper
are unsupported by its results.
In November 2014, an article in Nature exposed that some
academics were submitting fake contact details for recommended reviewers
to journals, so that if the publisher contacted the recommended
reviewer, they were the original author reviewing their own work under a
fake name. The Committee on Publication Ethics issued a statement warning of the fraudulent practice. In March 2015, BioMed Central retracted 43 articles and Springer retracted 64 papers in 10 journals in August 2015. Tumor Biology journal is another example of peer review fraud.
In 2020, the Journal of Nanoparticle Research
fell victim to an "organized rogue editor network", who impersonated
respected academics, got a themed issue created, and got 19 substandard
articles published (out of 80 submitted). The journal was praised for dealing with the scam openly and transparently.
Plagiarism
Reviewers
generally lack access to raw data, but do see the full text of the
manuscript, and are typically familiar with recent publications in the
area. Thus, they are in a better position to detect plagiarism of prose than fraudulent data. A few cases of such textual plagiarism by historians, for instance, have been widely publicized.
On the scientific side, a poll of 3,247 scientists funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health found 0.3% admitted faking data and 1.4% admitted plagiarism. Additionally, 4.7% of the same poll admitted to self-plagiarism or autoplagiarism, in which an author republishes the same material, data, or text, without citing their earlier work.
"Perhaps the most widely recognized failure of peer review is
its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work. The
list of important scientific papers that were rejected by some
peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far as the editor of Philosophical Transaction's 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner's report of the first vaccination against smallpox."
The Soon and Baliunas controversy involved the publication in 2003 of a review study written by aerospace engineer Willie Soon and astronomer Sallie Baliunas in the journal Climate Research, which was quickly taken up by the G.W. Bush administration as a basis for amending the first Environmental Protection AgencyReport on the Environment.
The paper was strongly criticized by numerous scientists for its
methodology and for its misuse of data from previously published
studies, prompting concerns about the peer review process of the paper.
The controversy resulted in the resignation of several editors of the
journal and the admission by its publisher Otto Kinne that the paper should not have been published as it was.
The trapezoidal rule, in which the method of Riemann sums for numerical integration was republished in a Diabetes research journal, Diabetes Care.
The method is almost always taught in high school calculus, and was
thus considered an example of an extremely well known idea being
re-branded as a new discovery.
A conference organized by the Wessex Institute of Technology
was the target of an exposé by three researchers who wrote nonsensical
papers (including one that was composed of random phrases). They
reported that the papers were "reviewed and provisionally accepted" and
concluded that the conference was an attempt to "sell" publication
possibilities to less experienced or naive researchers.This may however be better described as a lack of any actual peer review, rather than peer review having failed.
In the humanities, one of the most infamous cases of plagiarism
undetected by peer review involved Martin Stone, formerly professor of
medieval and Renaissance philosophy at the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte of the KU Leuven.
Martin Stone managed to publish at least forty articles and book
chapters that were almost entirely stolen from the work of others. Most
of these publications appeared in highly rated peer-reviewed journals
and book series.
In popular culture
In 2017, the Higher School of Economics
in Moscow unveiled a "Monument to an Anonymous Peer Reviewer". It takes
the form of a large concrete cube, or dice, with "Accept", "Minor
Changes", "Major Changes", "Revise and Resubmit" and "Reject" on its
five visible sides. Sociologist Igor Chirikov,
who devised the monument, said that while researchers have a love-hate
relationship with peer review, peer reviewers nonetheless do valuable
but mostly invisible work, and the monument is a tribute to them.
