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Flashback on peer review

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

In 1999, Richard Smith of BMJ wrote an article Opening up BMJ peer review which discussed some of the defects of anonymous peer review.

Although written BEFORE the frauds of Jan-Hendrik Schon and Hwang Woo Suk in the journal Science, Smith observed:

Peer review is at the heart of the scientific process yet was until recently largely unexamined. Now we begin to have a body of evidence on peer review (www.wame.org), and it illustrates many defects. Peer review is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud. Smith of course was right, and was certainly proved right by Schon and Hwang.

Smith's article was written after the classic idea theft from the Chu paper on superconductors, and after the 1995 Law & Order episode "Big Bang," and observed:

Finally, openness should eliminate some of the worst abuses of peer review, where reviewers?under the cloak of anonymity?steal ideas or procrastinate.

As to "peer review" of patent applications, a patent applicant is nominally protected from idea theft (it is a patent application), BUT a competitor-reviewer may have a conflict-of-interest in not wanting the patent granted. Idea theft is one thing, and depriving someone else of proper credit/reward is a different thing.

On the flip side, the reviewer's analysis may be influenced by fear of reprisal. Smith wrote:

The main argument against open peer review?a sad one?is that junior reviewers will be reluctant to criticise the work of senior researchers for fear of reprisals.

Full post as published by IPBiz on November 04, 2008 (boomark / email).