Innovations in peer review: join a discussion with our Editors by Shreeya Nanda.
From the post:
Innovation may not be an adjective often associated with peer review, indeed commentators have claimed that peer review slows innovation and creativity in science. Preconceptions aside, publishers are attempting to shake things up a little, with various innovations in peer review, and these are the focus of a panel discussion at BioMed Central’s Editors’ Conference on Wednesday 23 April in Doha, Qatar. This follows our spirited discussion at the Experimental Biology conference in Boston last year.
The discussion last year focussed on the limitations of the traditional peer review model (you can see a video here). This year we want to talk about innovations in the field and the ways in which the limitations are being addressed. Specifically, we will focus on open peer review, portable peer review – in which we help authors transfer their manuscript, often with reviewers’ reports, to a more appropriate journal – and decoupled peer review, which is undertaken by a company or organisation independent of, or on contract from, a journal.
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We will be live tweeting from the session at 11.15am local time (9.15am BST), so if you want to join the discussion or put questions to our panellists, please follow #BMCEds14. If you want to brush up on any or all of the models that we’ll be discussing, have a look at some of the content from around BioMed Central’s journals, blogs and Biome below:
This post includes pointers to a number of useful resources concerning the debate around peer review.
But there are oddities as well. First, the claim that peer review “slows innovation and creativity in science,” considering recent reports that peer review is no better than random chance for grants (…lotteries to pick NIH research-grant recipients and the not infrequent reports of false papers, fraud in actual papers, and a general inability to replicate research described in papers (Reproducible Research/(Mapping?)).
A claim doesn’t have to appear on the alt.fringe.peer.review newsgroup (imaginary newsgroup) in order to be questionable on its face.
Secondly, despite the invitation to follow and participate on Twitter, holding the meeting in Qartar means potential attendees from the United States will have to rise at:
Eastern 4:15 AM (last year’s location)
Central 3:15 AM
Mountain 2:15 AM
Western 1:15 AM
I wonder what the participation levels will be from Boston last year as compared to Qatar this year?
Nothing against non-United States locations but non-junket locations, such as major educational/research hubs, should be the sites for such meetings.