Peer review – issues, limitations, and future development

Abstract

Abstract Peer review is almost universally seen as the crux of scientific journal publishing. The role of peer reviewers is (1) to help avoid unnecessary errors in the published article, and (2) to judge publication-worthiness (in the journal that arranges for the review). This happens. Sometimes. But the notion of peer review is rather vague, and since most of it is anonymous, it is very difficult – arguably impossible – for researchers to know if the articles they read have been reliably peer reviewed and which criteria have been used to come to the decision to accept for publication. On top of that, peer review is very expensive. Not the peer review itself, as it is mostly done by researchers without being paid for it, but the process as arranged by publishers. This has several underlying causes, but it is clear that the actual cost of technically publishing an article is but a fraction of the average APC (Article Processing Charge) income or per-article subscription revenues publishers routinely realize. Some (e.g. Richard Smith, ex-Editor of the British Medical Journal) advocate abolishing peer review altogether. This is certainly not without merit, but even without abolishing it, there are ways to make peer review more reliable and transparent, and much cheaper to the scientific community.