English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Conventional peer review: rights and wrongs Peer review is broken. We have all heard that phrase many times in recent years. It’s become a truism, a shorthand complaint about the status quo that rarely extends into a proposal for change. And even those who do not believe standard peer review is beyond repair acknowledge that there are problems; everyone can see the cracks. So what’s wrong? From an author’s point of view, a lot. Peer review is slow; it delays publication. It’s almost always secret; authors do not know who is reviewing their work – perhaps an ally but, equally, perhaps a competitor. It can block ingenuity; think of the classic case of Lynn Margulis and the 15 or so journals that rejected her ground-breaking article “On the origin of mitosing cells” (Sagan, 1967) before it was finally accepted by The Journal of Theoretical Biology. And there’s a lot wrong for reviewers too: what proportion of referee reports are second, third, or even fourth round reviews? A referee’s hard work may be contributing nothing new to an author who would rather take his or her chances with another journal than do the extra work suggested by reviewers for journals one to three. Does conventional peer review work for publishers? Well, yes and no. Yes, at top-flight journals like Nature or NEJM peer review is a gate keeper that helps guarantee publication of only the most interesting articles, and yes, in theory, it helps guard against the publication of flawed work, but it’s expensive – even though reviewers work for free – and it’s time-consuming. Nature or NEJM review thousands of papers each year that would not make it into their journals; for third-, fourth-, or fifth-tier journals, somewhere further down the inevitable cascade, referees will often be doing work that has been done already on an article that was written months ago. If standard peer review is intended to help ensure that an article is good enough to be published, is it working? And in this context, what does “good enough” even mean? Since most papers will eventually be published, cascading until they find a journal, that means that most papers are good enough for someone and peer review’s supposed qualitative gatekeeper role is not supportable. The impact of peer review on the publication of an article is not so much a question of yes or no, it’s more likely to be a question of when and where. Yet even acknowledging the flaws, redundancies, and costs of the conventional peer review system, it is clear that we need peer review. The more specialized science becomes the more we must rely on experts to help us navigate the multiplicity of subject areas we are not expert in ourselves. Peer reviewers are those experts and we depend on the refereeing process to protect us from sloppy work and invalid conclusions. So peer review is important but the way it happens is problematic At F1000, we believe that most of the weaknesses of standard peer review can be linked to two core issues, first that it is conducted pre-publication and second that it is secret. Pre-publication peer review allows journals and reviewers to delay, filter, and interrupt the essential conversation of science, and secrecy makes these problems impossible to resolve.

Post-Publication Peer Review: Opening Up Scientific Conversation