I noticed in a tweet of a Research Information posting about Elsevier’s new peer-review experiment for Chemical Physics Letters called PeerChoice.
On the scale of news, PeerChoice is a murmur. Reviewers for one journal will now have the freedom to choose which articles they would like to review, hopefully matching their expertise and interest, in an attempt to increase efficiency and effectiveness of the peer review process.
But what is the content of these peer review assessments? How is the reader to know how many or whom rose to the editorial challenge of an unbiased evaluation?
Until the recent open access movement, there was simply an expectation that peers reviewing peers conducted themselves ethically and morally under the supervision of an ethical and uncorrupted editor. This traditional “black box” peer review mechanism received scant attention, as the disciples of Ingelfinger stood guard for health consumers by stopping premature medical information with the peer review black box at prominent journals.
That was then, this is now: most of us in academic medical centers are beginning to deal with issues of corporate influence in medical education, be it free lunches at sponsored grand rounds, free samples of pharmaceuticals, and the use of corporate ghost writers to help busy clinicians report results of clinical trials. Could not the sanctity of peer review be tainted, at a minimum, with some sort of competing interest? What if there were public acknowledgment of peer reviewers and perhaps the publication of their review, noting any competing interests and allowing readers to draw their own conclusion about whether a competing interest was significant?
The open access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) recognized the interest that might be generated open peer review and began to offer their journals this option. With BMC open peer review, reviewers for journals that select this option ask reviewers to declare any competing interests, and a full publication history, including the reviewers’ reports, is made available with the final article. This option has been around for new and converted independent BMC journals for at least five years. Here is an example of a BMC article history with peer reviews.
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has even conducted a randomized controlled trial to reach the conclusion that open peer review can lead to substantial positive effects.
Effect of open peer review on quality of reviews and on reviewers' recommendations: a randomised trial. BMJ 1999;318:23-27 ( 2 January )
It has been more than 10 years since the BMJ article. Elsevier is finally getting around to tinkering with peer review for its journals. I think it is time for Elsevier to see the advantage of supporting a movement toward open peer reviewing. I welcome comments.
