Team Scholastica has spent the last year gleaning thoughts from journal editors, authors, and reviewers. Most of them have been very passionate about the problems they find in the academic peer review process. Of course, there are some journal editors who are completely fine with the process as they see it. They can't imagine any sort of innovation to improve it.
Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley, has a post titled, 'Peer review is f***ed up- let's fix it,' where he outlines the following problems:
1. The process takes a really long time
-"In my experience, the first round of reviews rarely takes less than a month, and often take a lot longer, with papers sitting on reviewers’ desks the primary rate-limiting step. But even more time consuming is what happens after the initial round of review, when papers have to be rewritten, often with new data collected and analyses done. For typical papers from my lab it takes 6 to 9 months from initial submission to publication."
2. The system is not very good at what it purports to do.
- "The values that people primarily ascribe to peer review are maintaining the integrity of the scientific literature by preventing the publication of flawed science; filtering of the mass of papers into to identify those one should read; and providing a system for evaluating the contribution of individual scientists for hiring, funding and promotion. But it doesn’t actually do any of these things effectively."
My questions to the group are: is he right? Do these problems truly exist in your experience? If so, at what extreme? Furthermore, is this something limited to the sciences or applicable to peer review in other disciplines? What do you think of Scholastica's efforts to fix these problems?
