Under fire: a periodic attack from within

The peer review process, by which scientific research is accepted or rejected by leading journals such as Nature and Science, has come under one of its periodic attacks from within. This might seem an arcane matter to the general public, but it does matter to us all because peer review governs the quality of medical research that leads to the development of new treatments. The drugs we are prescribed a decade from now for a range of conditions—from cancer or heart disease to allergies—may hinge on peer review today. It can also influence the scientific advice ultimately determining major policy decisions—for example, about climate change.

The problem is that cutting edge research can only be properly assessed by specialists in the field who are, to some extent, rivals and may be subliminally at least motivated to produce slightly negative comments. In many fields there is just a handful of leading specialists around the world who both produce original work themselves and also peer review each other’s work.Such an arrangement may be the only one to ensure suitably expert assessment, but does inevitably elicit bouts of paranoia among scientists when their research submissions are either rejected as a result of negative comments from reviewers, or bogged down with requests for extensive further experiments that may take several years.

The latest complaint seems more than paranoia, however, since it came from 14 leading stem cell researchers in an open letter to all the major journals—journals in which scientists must publish if they want be taken seriously in their field and have their work funded. The accusation is essentially that self interest governs some of the peer review comments and therefore decides which research is published and ultimately taken further.

There is another factor not mentioned in the current complaint, which is that the journals themselves have become much more commercially minded in recent years, and compete for subscription and advertising revenues as well as mindshare. This tends to favour publication of fashionable research—including, ironically, stem cell work, to the detriment of, say, plant biology, where there is equally interesting work going on that may also hold great societal value. At one time scientific journals were little more than repositories for research papers and in effect totally agnostic. This made them almost unreadable by anyone other than scientists in the fields concerned, but did at least mean that commercial factors did not influence publication.

The main suggestion for improving the peer review process has been to publish the comments of the referees with the papers to highlight possible weaknesses and strengths in the research—a measure already adopted by the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) journal, which is in fact published by Nature. But there must also be a case for creating at least some space within the journals for research that is independently selected as well as assessed, providing a mainstream outlet for unfashionable science. After all, history has shown that so-called blue skies research leads ultimately to just as many important medical, technological and engineering breakthroughs as “goal-led” science.