This week is Peer Review Week 2019, how are you celebrating?
The Scholarly Kitchen is continuing their tradition of asking a peer review question. Because the theme this year is quality in peer review, they are asking: How do different stakeholders – authors, editors, readers, publishers, the public – value peer review quality?
The responses that came from the “chefs” were not unexpected but interesting. Tim Vines, consultant with Origin Editorial, longed for an ideal world where quality wasn’t a factor because “all published articles would have been thoroughly reviewed (and revised) and there would be little difference in quality among articles, no matter which journal they appear in.”
Phill Jones, owner and principal consultant at Double L Digital, quoted Winston Churchill, who once said, “…that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…”. He tied this observation to academics and their view of peer-review. “It’s hard to imagine that passing a manuscript to two or three peers for feedback is going to catch all the possible problems, mistakes, or areas for improvement in a research project.”
How would you answer that question?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
