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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday February 13 2018, @10:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the clearing-up-transparency dept.

Attendees of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute meeting debated whether or not science journals should publish the text of peer reviews, or even require peer reviewers to publicly sign their paper critiques:

Scientific journals should start routinely publishing the text of peer reviews for each paper they accept, said attendees at a meeting last week of scientists, academic publishers, and funding organizations. But there was little consensus on whether reviewers should have to publicly sign their critiques, which traditionally are accessible only to editors and authors.

The meeting—hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) here, and sponsored by HHMI; ASAPbio, a group that promotes the use of life sciences preprints; and the London-based Wellcome Trust—drew more than 100 participants interested in catalyzing efforts to improve the vetting of manuscripts and exploring ways to open up what many called an excessively opaque and slow system of peer review. The crowd heard presentations and held small group discussions on an array of issues. One hot topic: whether journals should publish the analyses of submitted papers written by peer reviewers.

Publishing the reviews would advance training and understanding about how the peer-review system works, many speakers argued. Some noted that the evaluations sometimes contain insights that can prompt scientists to think about their field in new ways. And the reviews can serve as models for early career researchers, demonstrating how to write thorough evaluations. "We saw huge benefits to [publishing reviews] that outweigh the risks," said Sue Biggins, a genetics researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, summarizing one discussion.

But attendees also highlighted potential problems. For example, someone could cherry pick critical comments on clinical research studies that are involved in litigation or public controversy, potentially skewing perceptions of the studies. A possible solution? Scientists should work to "make the public understand that [peer review] is a fault-finding process and that criticism is part of and expected in that process," said Veronique Kiermer, executive editor of the PLOS suite of journals, based in San Francisco, California.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 14 2018, @02:54PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday February 14 2018, @02:54PM (#637605) Journal

    They are talking about making the reviews public, not losing the reviewers' anonymity.

    One is likely a subset of the other. If you analyse writing styles and correlate with the set of reviewers for each paper, using the conflicts to eliminate possible solutions, then you'll be able to deanonymise a lot of reviews.

    Reviewers can get lazy, and reject papers because that's less work for them.

    That's a problem for the PC. A poor review should be ignored and in good venues usually is. A really good review is a lot of effort to write, and will include a detailed suggestions for improvements. I strongly suspect that people would be less willing to commit all of this to a public form that is potentially vulnerable to deanonymisation than they would be to just write things down than they would to something that is shared only with the authors.

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