The privilege of becoming a scientific peer reviewer

Science and culture, 2021

European Journal of Oncology …, 2004

The Historical Journal

Despite being coined only in the early 1970s, ‘peer review’ has become a powerful rhetorical concept in modern academic discourse, tasked with ensuring the reliability and reputation of scholarly research. Its origins have commonly been dated to the foundation of the Philosophical Transactions in 1665, or to early learned societies more generally, with little consideration of the intervening historical development. It is clear from our analysis of the Royal Society's editorial practices from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries that the function of refereeing, and the social and intellectual meaning associated with scholarly publication, has historically been quite different from the function and meaning now associated with peer review. Refereeing emerged as part of the social practices associated with arranging the meetings and publications of gentlemanly learned societies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such societies had particular needs for processes t...

Postdigital Science and Education, 2020

Academic publishing is central to knowledge development. In words of Richard Feynman (1969: 320), ‘[e]ach generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the [human] race does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom’. Since 1665, when Henry Oldenburg founded the first modern scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, this delicate balance is achieved through various peer review practices. Despite their long history, today’s peer review practices are often opaque. According to Jackson et al. (2018: 95–96), peer review ‘has become one of the most mysterious and contentious academic practices, causing anguish for many academics—both reviewers, and those whose work is reviewed—and sometimes more distress than is necessary’. This opacity and mystery are somewh...

Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 2018

Science and Engineering Ethics, 2002

As one who has competed for-as well as studied the process, administered the award and decline, and edited the results of-peer-reviewed funding, I am convinced that there is nothing new in the universe of behaviors that populate this very human ritual of quality control. In 1986, I published an article, "Much Ado about Peer Review," that summarized my findings to date. 1 Sporadic analysis and thinking about the ritual, especially its intrinsic atavism in the name of innovation, continues. Spier's offering (within a UK frame of reference) is thus welcome, both for its heuristic quality and as an occasion for updating my own (U.S.-centric) thinking. 2 Hence, Part 2. When Edward Hackett and I undertook the studies that became our book on peer review in 1990, 3 we soon discovered that scientists eschewed self-study, particularly of the mechanism that allowed them to "gatekeep" the resources enabling intellectual communities to inch forward, namely, funding to support one's research program and space to share the results of that program with the relevant community. Gaining access to reviewers' reports, even editors' sanitized tidings of good or bad news, was typically foreclosed by confidentiality promises and less-than-stellar recordkeeping. Federal agencies still resist releasing information 4 about who applies for, as opposed to who receives, grant funding. And for all we know, editors in an electronic publication age may have invented "dual bookkeeping" of reviews and comments that distinguish the public from the private e-mail record. This is the environment into which Raymond Spier has trekked. In trying to elucidate the "general case," i.e., peer review and innovation, he has overstated what works, what does not and why, but he says it far better than most. Surely, the most generalizable finding about peer review is that its customs, down to the core criteria of excellence, vary by community and over time. This is a dynamic picture, which

Clinical orthopaedics and related research, 2015

2015

The aim of the IUFRO's Working Party 9.01.06 (Forest Science Publishing) is to provide a forum for discussions, training, exchange of ideas, and development of editorial practices of journals dealing with forests, wood science, and related research. Editors of scientific journals are typically scientists who have been selected for the editorial responsibilities without having had much training on the main issues underlying scientific publishing. Publishing scientific articles differs from publishing other material in the need for strict control, mostly implemented by peer review, to maintain scientific quality and integrity. In addition to the scientific community, scientific knowledge should also be efficiently disseminated to disparate target audiences, e.g., policy makers, industry practitioners, and onthe-ground foresters. With the advent of on-line publishing and novel electronic media, the growing demand for open access publications, and the emergence of new ethical issues in publishing, the scientific publishing field is undergoing profound changes and confronting new expectations. Although some well-established publishers provide their journal editors training and opportunities for professional development, most forest science journal editors are still learning their work by doing rather than through specialized training. This is particularly true for professional and learned societies that publish journals, even as these publications continue to contribute significantly to the promulgation of forest science knowledge. This on-line publication contains the abstracts of the presentations in the first workshop organised by the working party. Based on prior proposals collected from working party members, the first workshop discussed especially problems and solutions related to peer-review and openness of research publishing. Peer-review is a centuries old tradition for assuring the quality of scientific work. The first written source referring to a kind of peer-review is a book Ethics of the Physician by Ishap bin Ali Al Rahwi (CE 854-931) of Syria. He requested physicians to keep notes on their patients and cures applied. These notes would be evaluated by peer physicians in the case of a treatment failure. However, the modern systematic peer-review of all manuscripts submitted to a journal by two or more knowledgeable scientists covered all scientific journals only in the 20 th century. The wide-spread use of peer-review is in a way also its major problem: As manuscript submissions increase in a fast pace, the knowledgeable peers simply do not have time to respond positively to all review requests, leading to saturation of the system. In the workshop, we heard a keynote talk on the solution proposed by Peerage of Science service: The manuscripts are submitted to peer-review before submission to a journal. Anonymous manuscripts are accessible to peers willing to comment them, thus, widening the pool of potential reviewers. Other innovations were discussed in the working groups. Many major agencies funding science request open access to the publications derived from research funded by them. This is especially true for major public agencies like the National Institutes of Health of the USA or the European Union but some major foundations have followed the lead. While open access certainly improves dissemination of research results, it also requires reorganisation of the publishing field as the journals do not receive any subscription income. Main question for many journals to stay alive is if the science funders are willing to pay for article processing. A keynote dealt with these issues, as well as the dealing of open data in forest sciences. Voluntary presentations presented some interesting case studies on several forest science journals. Training the next generation of science authors, reviewers, and editors is an important objective of the working party. Thus, an open session for early-career scientists was organised as a part of the workshop. The editors gathered in the workshop gave talks on the scientific publishing process for the audience that consisted of young Finnish scientists in forest, agricultural, and environmental sciences. Strong participation to the open session clearly indicated the need for these kinds of activities. The workshop was hosted by the Finnish Society of Forest Science and its organisation was supported the International Organising Committee formed by Dr Erwin Dreyer (Annals of Forest Science), Prof. Douglass F. Jacobs (New Forests), Dr W. Keith Moser (Forest Science), Dr Harri Mäkinen (Forest Ecology and Management), Asst. Prof. Danielle Way (Tree Physiology), and the undersigned. The organising committee reviewed all contributions to workshop. This and all other work of the committee is highly appreciated.

2010

Despite their critical importance to the scientific enterprise, reviewers receive no formal training and reviewing has become a skill that they pick up through trial and error. Additionally, because most reviewers do not receive any feedback on their performance, any bad reviewing habits become entrenched over time. This has contributed to significant and unnecessary anxiety about reviewing and to antagonistic encounters between reviewers and authors. This paper seeks to ameliorate this situation by defining reviewers as co-creators of scholarship and reviewing as a quality control process in the production of scientific scholarship. The paper provides three groups of activities aimed at creating the right reviewer mindset to facilitate this co-creation and quality control activities: relationships, commitment and honest and clear recommendations to the editor.

… : A Journal for the History and …, 2011