Blogger Glyn Moody at Open … argues that in the Internet age it may be unnecessary to have pre-publication peer-review of a scientific paper if scientists are able to provide a rating of its content post-publication, whereas blogger Deepak Singh feels that while there are problems with the existing peer-review system, it can be a source of advice that improves the quality of science. With diminishing quality of peer-review, in part due to reviewer fatigue, S. Pelech observes that the best science is no longer necessarily funded and much of the published science is incremental, redundant and flawed. Read More...

Tags: Peer Review, Post-publication peer-review, Grant reviews, Manuscript reviews

Blogger Ewen Callaway in Nature's The Great Beyond critiqued a PLoS One paper in which researchers analyze whether open peer review systems discourage biases, such as those that often surface when authors request specific reviewers for their manuscripts (e.g. "on papers where there was disagreement among ... reviewers, those recommended by the author were more likely to provide favorable feedback and accept a paper than the editor-recommended reviewer."). S. Pelech notes that at the end of the day, it is really up the to general scientific community to accept or disregard the validity of the data and conclusions in a paper, and advocates that peer-review should not be completely anonymous. Read More...

Tags: Peer Review, Bias

Jeremy Berg at the NIGMS Feedback Loop reported from the examination of 789 R01 grants that NIGMS funded during fiscal year 2006 that these linked to 6,554 publications from fiscal years 2007 through 2010, and have been cited over 79,295 times as of two months ago. With respect to the percentile score of these grants, this was said to correlate best with the number of overall citations and least with the number of highly cited publications. S. Pelech argues that this NIGMS peer-review study actually demonstrated a relatively poor correlation between peer review scores and various measures of scientific output, especially within the top 20 percentile of peer review scores. Read More...

Tags: Grant funding, Peer Review

Blogger Michael Eisen at It Is Not Junk blog noted that the current peer review system is plagued with problems, including domination by a few gate-keeper journals, overly lengthy, conservative and intrusive reviews, and failure to ensure that high-quality science gets published, but fraudulent or otherwise "flawed" science does not. He advocates that pre-review system in which an assigned editor, who would make a first assessment as to the suitability for publication, and if it passes the screen, it then gets sent to peer reviewers, who assess the technical validity of the paper and the intended audience. S. Pelech doubts that with over a million scientific publications appearing annually from thousands of scientific journals world-wide, that "a handful of journals are considered the "gatekeepers of success in science." He also finds the concept that a scientific paper should be pre-reviewed by a full-time journal editor disturbing as individuals in these positions often have much less actual research experience and are probably less informed about advancements in specialized fields. Read More...

Tags: Peer Review