The promise of peer review

An interesting and insightful article by Vivian Siegel:

It is ironic that, in an era known for the great speed and availability of information - where we could choose to blog our results rather than submit them to journals - publishing papers seems slower and more painful than ever before.

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I believe our best hope for fair and constructive decisions is to relieve reviewers of the responsibility to make recommendations for or against publication and to maintain a separate, much smaller pool of editors who can be dedicated to the journal and to its standards, and who can discuss the decision with full knowledge of other papers being considered by the journal. This would of course require editors to take responsibility for their decisions and not to hide behind the recommendations of anonymous reviewers.

If we ask reviewers to concentrate on the research, I think it will make the review itself more constructive. When we launched PLoS Biology, I noticed that reviewers often wrote that they were unable to make recommendations because they didn't know what we wanted to publish, so they had to stick to the strengths and weaknesses of the paper, leaving the editors to decide whether to accept it. Interestingly, authors told us that the reviews from PLoS Biology were among the most constructive they had ever received, even if we decided against publishing the paper. I've heard this phenomenon echoed by editors at other new journals, leading me to imagine a day when peer review is uncoupled from journal selection, making the process essentially 'journal blind'.