The peer-review process remains a central part of the value and validity of scientific and technical publishing and proposal assessment. The peer review mechanism has many delicate components that should function most professionally and effectively for best results. An important central tenet is that all who seek to publish should freely avail themselves to review a commensurate load, considering many elements of professional conduct, ethics and responsibility in this process. The review itself should provide timely, unbiased, quality feedback to improve contributions to the system reviewers are serving. An additional component involves follow-on policing of published literature to assert its validity through consensus and validation. This short essay examines our collective duties as contributors, reviewers, and readers to the integrity and safekeeping of this essential quality control process.
The peer-review process remains a central part of the value and validity of scientific and technical publishing and proposal assessment. The peer review mechanism has many delicate components that should function most professionally and effectively for best results. An important central tenet is that all who seek to publish should freely avail themselves to review a commensurate load, considering many elements of professional conduct, ethics and responsibility in this process. The review itself should provide timely, unbiased, quality feedback to improve contributions to the system reviewers are serving. An additional component involves follow-on policing of published literature to assert its validity through consensus and validation. This short essay examines our collective duties as contributors, reviewers, and readers to the integrity and safekeeping of this essential quality control process.
The reliability and quality of published technical research relies continually on closely linked and coordinated research and development creativity, effective reporting, and credible reviewing and editorial duties. The impact of technical communication and science and engineering progress and innovation are intrinsically coupled through the peer-review process. Poor peer review diminishes the average published manuscript quality, but also inadvertently allows approaches and results to be published that are either inadequately documented, simply wrong or unworthy of further pursuit. These become costly red herrings to the research and development community, costing money, time and wasted efforts to duplicate. Publishing is never free to any of the participants. The true cost of “producing” a paper is readily calculated by dividing your laboratory's annual budget by the number of papers published yearly. In most cases, this cost per manuscript is quite high, representing an important accountability factor to our funding sources, often fellow taxpayers who subsidize public research sources. Lastly, journals are increasingly faced with page limitations from publishers, where even reasonable quality (but not the best) papers might not make the publication quota, despite scientific credibility and solid foundation. This “survival of the fittest” mode uses shear numbers and fierce publication competition to cull out weaker papers. With a 50% rejection rate, only the most interesting papers may eventually be published, even if all are scientifically valid: quality, defined in arbitrary ways, will prevail at the expense of quantity. Such curtailing of publishable data using a prioritization scheme to select only the highest quality or most-appealing data is a risky undertaking mandated by the simple economics of the publication process. But, in an effective peer review process, such culling could drastically reduce the time and effort required to continually find the important, relevant results for each of us in our field by limiting the amount of lower quality information flooding the literature.
One alternative currently advocated is to use on-line publications with wider, direct world-wide accessibility to increase technical literature volume and exposure. Many innovative, alternative forms of electronic publishing and “open” alternative forms peer reviewing are now possible with world-wide, instant on-line access. Some of these are currently in trials or active discussion [8] and [15]. However, it does not require much thought to ponder problems of poor quality peer review (or complete lack of any credible review or editorial processes as is occurring in some on-line venues) in wasting significant time and effort in searching, reading and pursuing research of uncertain quality or that lacks any publication standards.
Clearly, the best, most efficient method to ensure science and engineering publishing credibility and technical progress is by advocating consistent peer-reviewing standards across all aspects of our reporting procedures. The technical community would best openly endorse the collective professional responsibility to actively participate in this system to make it work effectively.
