Peer review

“I’m asking students to peer review each other’s work this semester. Any comments/thoughts much appreciated. Details: http://bit.ly/exKsP3” (tweet)

[Stephen Kinsella, Twitter, 26 January]

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Do peer reviewers get worse with experience? Plus a poll

“… We’re not here to defend peer review against its many critics. We have the same feelings about it that Churchill did about democracy, aka the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Of course, a good number of the retractions we write about are due to misconduct, and it’s not clear how peer review, no matter how good, would detect out-and-out fraud …” (more)

[Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch, 23 November]

Who needs friends when you’ve got peer reviewers?

“In science it pays to have friends. Peer reviewers picked by the authors of a manuscript tend to provide more favourable feedback than scientists selected by the journal’s editors. That’s the unsurprising conclusion of an analysis of more than 500 manuscripts …” (more)

[Ewen Callaway, The Great Beyond, 18 October]

The Peer-Review Fetish

“I respect peer review as much as the next person and have done my share of publishing in peer-reviewed outlets. But I question the belief, expressed often in academic, media, and policy circles, that ‘not peer reviewed’ means ‘worthless’ and ‘peer reviewed’ means ‘should be accepted without question’ …” (more)

[Peter Klein, Organizations and Markets, 29 September]

Turning your research into published articles

“The pressure-cooker world of academia now has two Holy Grails. The monograph has been dealt with by Pue’s before. The other, an article in a peer-reviewed journal, is what I’ve been asked to write about – from the editor’s point of view …” (more)

[Eoin Magennis, Pue’s Occurrences, 22 September]

Peer Review Highly Sensitive To Poor Refereeing, Claim Researchers

“Just a small number of bad referees can significantly undermine the ability of the peer-review system to select the best scientific papers. That is according to a pair of complex systems researchers in Austria who have modelled an academic publishing system and showed that human foibles can have a dramatic effect on the quality of published science …” (more)

[Scholarship 2.0, 13 September]

Peer reviewers swamped, so extras get the heave-ho

“A biomedical journal has sparked debate about transparency and the limits of peer review after announcing that it will no longer accept extra material submitted with academic papers. Until now, in common with many scientific journals, The Journal of Neuroscience has hosted supplementary material …” (more)

[Paul Jump, Times Higher Education, 9 September]

Peer review is no picnic

“Anyone who thinks peer review is a process of nudges and winks from your mates has never faced the harsh reality of having your work pulled apart …” (more)

[Jenny Rohn, Guardian Science Blog, 6 September]

Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review

“For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century. Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals …” (more)

[Patricia Cohen, New York Times, 23 August]

Talented cephalopod

“Paul the octopus has been selecting which manuscripts go out for review at Nature for months now.” (tweet)

[Noah Gray, Twitter, 11 July]

Peer review provides £209,976,000 public subsidy to commercial publishers

“The Open University’s Martin Weller looks at the Peer Review Survey 2009’s numbers on free participation by UK academics in the peer review process for commercial science journals and concludes that 10.4m hours spent on this amounts to a £209,976,000 subsidy from publicly funded universities to private, for-profit journals, who then charge small fortunes to the same institutions …” (more)

[Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing, 13 June]

Richard Smith: Scrap peer review and beware of ‘top journals’

“The neurologist and epidemiologist Cathie Sudlow has written a highly readable and important piece in the BMJ exposing Science magazine’s poor reporting of a paper on chronic fatigue syndrome, but she reaches the wrong conclusions on how scientific publishing should change. For those of you who have missed the story …” (more)

[HT: Andrew Maynard]
[Juliet Walker, BMJ Group Blogs, 22 March]

Inside peer review

“Brevard College professor Robert Cabin takes up the topic of how pressed for time professors and students are – and along the way delivers an veiled indictment of both the peer review process and academic professionalism …” (more)

[Critical Mass, 12 March]

Elsevier to Editor: Change Controversial Journal or Resign

“The editor of the journal Medical Hypotheses — an oddity in the world of scientific publishing because it does not practice peer review — is about to lose his job over the publication last summer of a paper that says HIV does not cause AIDS. Publishing powerhouse Elsevier today told editor Bruce Charlton that it won’t renew his contract, which expires at the end of 2010, and it asked that Charlton resign immediately or implement a series of changes in his editorial policy …” (more)

[Martin Enserink, Science Insider, 8 March]

PEER Baseline – why don’t authors deposit?

“… For advocates of open access, and in particular institutional repositories, one immediately interesting question is Q 22: What reservations do you have about placing your peer-reviewed journal articles in publicly available repositories. Responses to this are quite fascinating. As a (very) rough analysis, putting together the figures seems to show that the most significant concern is a reluctance to put research publications in a repository where other materials have not been peer-reviewed, with nearly 50% considering this either very important or important …” (more)

[Research Communications, 4 February]

Peer review: What is it good for?

“It hasn’t been a real good week for peer review. In the same week that the Lancet fully retract the original Wakefield MMR article (while keeping the retraction behind a login screen – way to go there on public understanding of science), the main stream media went to town on the report of 14 stem cell scientists writing an open letter making the claim that peer review in that area was being dominated by a small group of people blocking the publication of innovative work …” (more)

[Cameron Neylon,  Science in the Open, 5 February]

Publisher attempts to rein in radical medical journal

“Editor rejects proposal to have submissions peer reviewed. The publisher of Medical Hypotheses has proposed that the irreverent journal should be revamped as an orthodox peer-review publication.In a letter to the editor, Elsevier proposes a ‘revised and more focused aim and scope’ for the journal and a ‘peer-review process for all submitted articles’ …” (more)

[Zoë Corbyn, Times Higher Education, 23 January]

Unclear outlook for radical journal as HIV/Aids deniers evoke outrage

“It has published papers on everything from ejaculation as a treatment for nasal congestion to why modern scientists are so dull, but the future of Medical Hypotheses is hanging in the balance after a host of complaints from high-profile researchers. The irreverent publication is the only Elsevier journal not to subject its submissions to peer review …” (more)

[Zoë Corbyn, Times Higher Education, 14 January]

Peer review isn’t the only game in town

“What is it that drives teenagers into anti-social behaviour? Why do they smoke, or underperform at school? Peer pressure, of course. What is it that keeps the quality of published academic work high, fostering rigour and professional standards? Peer review, of course. I loathe almost everything about the peer-review system …” (more)

[Jonathan Wolff, Guardian, 3 November]

‘Bigwig’ ushered ‘nonsense’ paper into top journal, say scientists

“Butterfly experts have been angered by the appearance in a top journal of a paper they say is bizarre and unsupported by evidence, claiming it was published only because it was ushered in by a ‘bigwig’ in the field. The paper, by Donald Williamson, a retired academic from the University of Liverpool, was published in advance online late last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Its publication was via a special ‘communication’ mechanism understood to be unique to PNAS. This allows national academy members to bypass normal editorial procedures and submit papers that they consider to be of particular importance without the normal peer-review requirements, although they must obtain two referees …” (more)

[Zoë Corbyn, Times Higher Education, 13 September]