• Do open comments on published papers work?
  There are various discussions about this possibility which takes after blogs and social media, and several trials have been conducted [eg http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/index.html]. Only 5% of authors choose this route, with a maximum of 4 comments/paper, which is not really useful in general. The comments in this case were signed and filtered. In experiments with blogging comments, scientists dodn’t want to be publically identified with comments due to the highly competitive environment they operate in. Many scientists simply don’t have time to make considered comments.

• Publish or perish culture
  There has been much debate about the development of this competition, eg. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/05/publish-perish-peer-review-science. Various of the worries are: that there are not enough people to review the submitted papers, that bad quality work still gets published somewhere, that people believe that everything that is published is unequivocally true, that there is a strong pressure to publish from University or research administrations, and that this is all driven by rapacious publishers. Various ideas have emerged to improve the system such as the need to limit the number of papers for each scientist (but already many funders or interviewers ask only for the top few anyway), or limit the number of research grants held at a time (as already happens in Spain). Other ideas are to provide a lifetime allocation of the number of journal paper pages allowed, or to develop anonymous commenting somehow in a better way. Perhaps we can give reviewers a formal editors’ rating of quality, or recognize reviewing more formally by interview panels and research assessment exercises.

For a top journal like Nature, of the submitted 10,000 papers every year their editors reject about 60% of them without review (since the journal’s launch in 1869, Nature’s editors have been the only arbiters of what it publishes). For instance compare this to Olympic medals: of 2300 medals handed out in 2012, 302 were gold, 302 silver, and 302 bronze.

The BMC journal (‘medical’ and ‘biological’) suggests medical journals operate ‘open’ peer review, where reviewers are known to the authors and names published, however reviewers are reluctant. Another journal (ETAI) suggests an open online access plus comments for 3 months – then an improved version is sent to anonymous pass/fail referees. Perhaps this might lead to more careful submissions, with less pressure on being fast.

Generally it is certainly noted that peer review is “not much good at picking up ethics problems or scientific fraud”. The main disadvantage of open review is the likely accumulation of ‘enemies’ who may later try to torpedo one’s own manuscripts or grant applications. See discussions at http://blogs.nature.com/peer-to-peer/.

• Do higher impact papers lead their fields?
  It has been noted that some papers that are crucial to developing new research fields do not manage to get into high impact journals on their initial publication [http://www.sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/11/apr3-11_1D/].