Against Peer Review
In our previous issue, we asked you to give us your opinion against the peer review process. Many thanks to our voters. Here are your randomly ordered top ten responses, in your own words.
1. Because we have to do more than one replicate for every experiment.
2. Peer reviewing delays the publication process. Scientific information should enter the public arena at the discretion of the researcher, not the reviewer.
3. The referees will not accept your paper for publication on the grounds that the results are too preliminary. Three months later, they will publish their own results with your ideas in Nature or Science.
4. Professional competition prevents unbiased reviews.
5. The peer review process is unfair because it emphasizes the status quo. New, radical, unorthordox, highly imaginative, etc. ideas are likely not to pass peer review, and are thus seldom see the light of publishing.
6. The reviewers always return my manuscripts but never return the money I include as a bribe.
7. The peer review process is unfair because it keeps really bad science from being published, thus depriving me of comedy and cautionary tales.
8. Only two good reasons to dismiss peer reviews:
A. I know best.
B. If by any chance I do not know best, point A is effective immediately.
9. Nepotism, nepotism, nepotism.
10. Power without responsibility.
Frederick H. Carlson is a professional artist and illustrator whose clients include The Saturday Evening Post, Baltimore Sun and Pittsburgh Magazine.
