Caustic volleys and the sting of peer review: what’s the solution?

“The peer review process sometimes seems to reflect all the civility of being thrown to the lions in the Coliseum.”

- Gregory Petsko – Weill Cornell Medical College, USA

Increasing frustration with a peer review process that sometimes seems to reflect all the civility of being thrown to the lions in the Coliseum has led to a flood of commentaries with suggestions for reform. These range from a restrained comment from Raff et al. in Science, in which they point out that getting experimental work published can take as long as or longer than doing the work in the first place, and that the extra experiments demanded by referees frequently only strengthen the conclusions marginally, to the later invective against the tyranny of reviewer experiments (sic) in which Hidde Ploegh makes similar points in Nature. Current in many labs is a spoof carol with the first line “Wreck their scrawls with caustic volleys”, sung to the tune of to the tune of “Deck the Halls”. Suggestions for reform include Virginia Walbot’s comment on how to train postdocs not to be pit-bull reviewers and, among many others, the publication policy of eLife, whose stated raison d’etre is to change the peer-review process, as well as the policy operated by BMC Biology, whereby authors may opt out of re-review after revision of their papers.

It could reasonably be argued that none of this would ever have become necessary had the scientific community not lost sight of the fact that the responsibility of a reviewer is to review the paper as written, not to redesign the science the way he or she believes it should have been done. As Bob Horvitz has neatly put it: “…what is in the paper is fundamentally the responsibility of the authors, not of the reviewers”. Furthermore, journal editors should be willing to disregard unreasonable requests from reviewers, and not act as though the role of the journal was to set the direction of science and micromanage its conduct. Editors need to be more responsible, and journal policies could use improvement, but arguably the problem with peer review can only be fixed by an attitude adjustment on the part of reviewers: a recognition that follow-up and confirming experiments belong in future papers, combined with a humility that eschews showing off in favor of actually doing one’s job. As Walt Kelly’s philosophical possum Pogo so eloquently put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Gregory Petsko

 

Panel discussion on peer review and painless publishing

 

As part of the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of BMC Biology’s publication, BioMed Central invited Gregory Petsko to chair a panel discussion on peer review with Hidde Ploegh and others in Boston on Sunday April 21, to provide a forum for the views of editors, reviewers, authors , and especially those who can claim to be all three, to put their points of view about the conduct of peer review and arrive at constructive solutions to the problems.

A summary of the panel discussion will be made available on Biome soon after the event.

 

Peer review experiments at BioMed Central

 

BioMed Central publishes a number of journals that have been experimenting with alternative peer review models, all aiming to improve transparency and address some of the problems discussed by Gregory Petsko above and by the participants at the panel discussion:

 

Editors-in-Chief: Eugene Koonin, Laura Landweber & David Lipman

Biology Direct offers a unique system of peer review: Authors are allowed to select suitable reviewers from the Editorial Board; and the peer-review process is made fully open to authors and readers, thus increasing the responsibility of the referees and eliminating sources of abuse in the refereeing process.

 

Editor: Miranda Robertson

BMC Biology operates a re-review opt-out policy: It offers authors who are asked to make revisions before a final decision is taken on their papers the opportunity to choose whether the paper is seen again by referees or whether the revisions and authors responses are judged by the editors alone.

 

Editor: Sabina Alam

BMC Medicine and all subject-specific medical BMC-series journals operate an ‘open peer review’ policy: Reviewers reveal their identity to the authors; and if an article is published, the complete pre-publication history, including all submitted versions, reviewers’ reports (and names) and authors’ responses, is provided with the published article.