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Opening peer-review: The democracy of science

January 2014
Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine 13(1):2

DOI:10.1186/1477-5751-13-2

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PubMed

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Bjorn R Olsen

Harvard Medical School

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E D I T O R I A L Open Access

Opening peer-review: the democracy of science

Daniel R Shanahan

and Bjorn R Olsen

Scientific journals have been called the ‘minutes of science’

[1]. Born out of the exchange of letters on scientific topics

and results, publication is a way of documenting what was

done and, particularly in the case of open-access journals,

sharing the outcome. Journal publications are considered

authoritative and are generally used to inform the work

of others, be it further research or, in the case of biomedi-

cine, in treatment decisions for patients. This makes some

kind of quality control all the more important.

The ‘gold standard’for this quality control is peer

review. Described as a form of self-regulation by quali-

fied members of a profession, it was first introduced by

Henry Oldenburg, the founding editor of Philosophical

Transactions of the Royal Society, in 1665 as a means of

vetting contributions to the Royal Society of London and

has persisted in various forms ever since [2].

Peer review is the evaluation of a piece of work by two

or more people of similar competence to the authors;

but, assuming the reviewing process excludes all those

involved in the direct research itself, the persons most

qualified to judge the validity of a submitted research

paper are precisely those who are the scientist’s closest

competitors. This means that the review process can

become adversarial, with referees seeming to see it as

their responsibility to insist on time-consuming additions

and revisions [3,4]. Moreover, under traditional, closed

peer-review policies, the identity of the reviewer is

withheld from the author, presenting them with a

greater opportunity to act arbitrarily. It was in an effort

to combat this bias that some journals introduced

double-blind peer-review, whereby the author’sname

was also concealed from the referee. However, research

is a small world and maintaining that blinding often

proved impossible.

So how did peer review, with these intrinsic issues and

biases, become the judicial system of the intellectual world?

Simply put, peer review is to science what democracy was

to Churchill –‘the worst form of government, except all

those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’

It has served science well, with a widely-held view that,

while it may not be perfect, it is nonetheless far better

than anything else we have been able to devise. Indeed,

the fundamental idea of peer-review seems sound; the

issues lie more with the execution. Under closed systems,

such as that currently enforced by the Journal of Negative

Results in BioMedicine, there is a lack of transparency of

the peer-review process and a lack of availability of

evaluative information about published articles to the

public. Therefore, as of February 2014, the Journal of

Negative Results in BioMedicine will adopt an open

peer-review policy.

Articles already published, or those manuscripts currently

submitted, will not be affected by this change. However,

for all manuscripts submitted during or after February

2014, authors will see the reviewers’names and, if the

article is published, the reading public will also see who

reviewed the article and how the authors responded.

This will be available as part of the pre-publication history

of the published article. The peer review process will

therefore be completely open and transparent, with the

peer reviews being part of the record.

Research into the effect of open peer review suggests

numerous benefits, in particular accountability, fairness

and crediting reviewers for their efforts [5-7]. Further-

more, in a recent study, Kowalczuk et al. revealed that

reviewer reports operating under an open peer-review

system were of overall higher quality than those under a

closed system, with higher scores on questions relating

to feedback on the methods (11% higher), constructiveness

of the comments (5% higher), and the amount of evidence

provided to substantiate the comments (9% higher) [8].

Despite this, we recognise that there are also negatives.

Some (junior) reviewers may feel uncomfortable signing a

critical report, especially when recommending rejection

[9]. This reluctance also means that more potential

referees may need to be invited to review a manuscript

openly than under a closed peer-review system (Parkin

EC et al. unpublished observations) [9-11].

Reviewing an article is no easy task and many of us

will have faced the situation where it feels we have put

more thought into our review of the article than the

* Correspondence: daniel.shanahan@biomedcentral.com

BioMed Central 6th Floor, 236 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB, UK

Full list of author information is available at the end of the article

Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public

Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this

article, unless otherwise stated.

Shanahan and Olsen Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine 2014, 13:2

http://www.jnrbm.com/content/13/1/2

authors did in designing the study and writing the manu-

script. The move towards an open peer-review policy

will give credit where it is due, but moreover will provide

valuable information to those reading the article, sharing

the referees’critique of the manuscript and presenting all

the necessary information for them to make an objective

evaluation for themselves.

Author details

BioMed Central 6th Floor, 236 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB, UK.

Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School, 240 Longwood

Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA.

Received: 20 January 2014 Accepted: 20 January 2014

References

1. Velterop JJM: Keeping the minutes of science. In Electronic library and

visual information research (ELVIRA 2). Edited by Collier M, Arnold K. Milton

Keynes, Aslib: Proceedings of the second ELVIRA conference at De Montfort

University; 1995.

2. National Research Council: On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible

Conduct in Research: Third Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies

Press; 2009.

3. Ploegh H: End the wasteful tyranny of reviewer experiments. Nature 2011,

472:391.

4. Walbot V: Are we training pit bulls to review our manuscripts? J Biol 2009,

8:24.

5. Godlee F: Making reviewers visible: openness, accountability, and credit.

JAMA 2002, 287:2762–2765.

6. Groves T: Is open peer review the fairest system? Yes. BMJ 2010, 341:c6424.

7. Pöschl U: Multi-stage open peer review: scientific evaluation integrating

the strengths of traditional peer review with the virtues of transparency

and self-regulation. Front Comput Neurosci 2012, 6:33.

8. Kowalczuk MK, Dudbridge F, Nanda S, Harriman SL, Moylan EC: A

comparison of the quality of reviewer reports from author-suggested

reviewers and editor-suggested reviewers in journals operating on open

or closed peer review models. F1000 Posters 2013, 4:1252.

9. Khan K: Is open peer review the fairest system? No. BMJ 2010, 341:c6425.

10. van Rooyen S, Godlee F, Evans S, Black N, Smith R: Effect of open peer

review on quality of reviews and on reviewers’recommendations: a

randomised trial. BMJ 1999, 318:23–27.

11. Editors TPSM: Peer review in PloS medicine. PLoS Med 2007, 4:e58.

doi:10.1186/1477-5751-13-2

Cite this article as: Shanahan and Olsen: Opening peer-review: the

democracy of science. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine

2014 13:2.

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Shanahan and Olsen Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine 2014, 13:2 Page 2 of 2

http://www.jnrbm.com/content/13/1/2

Published: January 2014

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Research National
Council

National Research Council: On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research: Third Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2009.