FEATURE
Professional insight peer
Rebecca Lawrence of F1000 asks: who is peer review for?
The pressures on authors to seek publication in high- impact factor journals leads to some behaving badly, as exemplified by the increasing number of peer review
fraud and rings being exposed recently. Equally, the pressure to be first out with a major finding causes some referees to be overly critical or hold papers up, as they are often natural competitors with the authors. Some referees may also need to justify to the editor that they did a good job, leading to excessive requests for additional data and experiments. In a world where anonymous pre-publication peer review is the norm, there are minimal consequences for the referee for any bad or inappropriate behaviour – nor is there any credit or recognition for good behaviour. This is why the movement towards open peer review (i.e. the referee is named and the review is published) is so important as it means the referee has to stand by what they say; studies have found, as we do on F1000Research, that open reviews are of comparable quality if not better quality, and also often more constructive. The referee can also get credit for the important work and contribution they have
12 Research Information FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 What’s next for review?
Six industry figures give their take on recent developments in the world of peer review, and some predictions for the years ahead
made to that article, especially when the reviews are made citable and included in ORCID profiles. I find it disappointing that so many journals that are experimenting with open review are doing so half-heartedly. Optional open peer review is really little better than closed review, as the referees generally only opt to name themselves when they are positive.
However, this still misses the point: who is peer review for? It should really be to help authors improve the presentation and interpretation of their work to maximise the potential for future research to build on it, and
The movement towards open peer review is so important
assure the scientific community, policy makers and public of the quality of the scientific findings. Peer review should be conducted in the open, once the findings have first been made public. It should be driven by the authors (but mediated by the publisher) who identify suitable referees from an agreed list of experts, and who decide openly how and when they address criticisms.
Fully open peer review has other benefits; we increasingly hear researchers say that when they find an article on F1000Research, one of the first things they do after looking at the title and abstract is to see who the referees are and what they said, before deciding whether to read the article.
Kaveh Bazargan of River Valley Technologies sees a trend towards integration between different systems
Peer review systems have been based on authors submitting files (e.g. Word, PDF) through an online system. The basic system has not changed much over the years, and there have been
complaints that interacting with the systems is time consuming.
It is useful to sum up what different stakeholders are looking for in the ideal submission and peer review system. Let us start
with the publishers, who want: l Cheaper platforms, with less dependency of cost on the number of submissions, and a lower entry cost for new journals;
l Simple to use, intuitive interfaces, using modern web technologies – why should staff go on training courses to use a peer review system?; and
l A single installation for all journals, allowing them, for example, to share reviewer databases, create global analytics, and move articles from one journal to another with a single click. Peer reviewers want easy commenting in situ, not having to refer to a line number of a PDF file, or even annotating a PDF, and easy access to all manuscripts assigned to them for review. At the same time, authors want a quick, reliable and user-friendly interface, and the ability to submit
Daniel Johnson of Publons says there is some cause for optimism over peer review
Musings on the future of peer review are usually pessimistic, as we extrapolate the trends of increasing article submissions, increasing researcher workloads, and rising cases of peer review
fraud, and prophesise more doom and gloom. The past year permits a bit of optimism, because 2015 was the year that credit for peer
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