The Peer-Review Problem: a sedimentological perspective

Abstract

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest physicists of all time, had a deep disdain for peer review. The peer-review process, introduced over a thousand years ago in Syria and fully formalized by the Royal Society of London during 1665-1752, is an integral part of quality control in publishing articles and in awarding research grants. However, there are many lingering problems, which include: 1) anointed experts, 2) blind peer reviews, 3) delays, 4) orthodoxy, 5) bias, 6) groupthink, 7) Peer rejection of ideas (including Nobel-Prize winners), 8) inconsistency, 9) politics, 10) fake peer review and plagiarism, 11) “Sham peer review” in the U.S. medical community, 12) settling old scores, 13) online publications, 14) acknowledgements, 15) controversies in geological sciences, and 16) imbalance of peer reviewers in the biomedical research. Transparency, which is the underpinning trait of science journalism, is lost in the secrecy of blind peer review. Under the blind peer review, there are at least eight examples of scientific papers that were rejected before going on to win a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, there are 33 striking cases of peer rejection in science, including the notorious theory of “continental drift” by Alfred Wegener. My own examples of papers in process sedimentology and petroleum geology show that the same manuscript was rejected by one journal, but was accepted by another, suggesting that the blind peer review is obsolete. A solution is to adopt an Open Peer Review (OPR). Barring an open peer review, an alternative path is to publishing the entire peer-review comments and recommended decisions of all reviewers (anonymous and identified) at the end of a paper. This practice not only would force the anonymous reviewer to be objective and accountable but also would allow the entire peer-review process to be transparent.