“…is sick and collapsing under its own weight.”
The biggest problem, he says, is the anonymity granted to reviewers, who are often competing fiercely for priority with authors they are reviewing. “What would be their reason to do it quickly?” Tracz asks. “Why would they not steal” ideas or data?
Anonymous review, Tracz notes, is the primary reason why months pass between submission and publication of findings. “Delayed publishing is criminal; it’s nonsensical,” he says. “It’s an artifact from an irrational, almost religious belief” in the peer-review system.
Climaquiddick was a particularly egregious case of it, but the whole system is broken. And this is what leads to so much crap science, not just in climate, but in nutrition and other areas. It doesn’t get properly reviewed or argued.
Not all peer review is anonymous. Of late I’ve been reading scientific articles about the origins of life, and many of them have publicly named reviewers.
The old system was based on the idea that since paper journals cost money, a scare resource, space to publish was limited and only the very best work justified filling the space. This ceased to be an issue with the emergence of the Internet. Its time for journal publications to move into the digital age with more digital publishing. But you need three things to occur for that to happen.
1) Return to having editors who know their subject in general are able to recognize junk at a glance.
2) Allowing the articles that pass editorial review to be posted online for public review, with someone, perhaps a moderator with subject knowledge, to monitor the comments/reviews for relevance. Reviewers would also vote if the article should be made available on a permanent website. After a reasonable review period, say 30 days, the moderator decides to either advances the article to a permanent website or returns it to the author(s) for revision based on the comments/reviews. Note, a majority of votes would not be needed, they would just be another indication of its value.
3) Acceptance by colleges, universities and other research institutions of digital publishing in the form above.
Yes, it would be a radical change but would greatly speed up publications in a field.
I review papers for a number of scientific journals. Without anonymous review, nobody would review honestly. It’s just like anything where you want honest opinions — if you attach a name to it, people will review with an eye to how it will affect them. If I am critical of a colleagues paper, how will he or she review my paper? How will that affect my ability to collaborate with him or her later? How will that affect how we interact in committee meetings. If my revews were not blinded, I’d simply stop doing them.
In contrast, the idea that reviewers will “steal” the ideas of the papers they review is, while not impossible, so improbable as to be silly. I am, for instance, finishing up on a paper that took me a year and a sizeable grant to create. Does anybody seriously think that in the time it takes me to revise a manuscript (or turn it around to another journal if rejected) that one of the reviewers will write a grant, get it funded, do the research, analyze the data and write a manuscript that will get published before mine? Please.