The documented low levels of reliability of the peer review process present a serious challenge to editors who must often base their publication decisions on conflicting referee recommendations. The purpose of this article is to discuss this process and examine ways to produce a more reliable and useful peer review system.

Rl In response to Somit & Peterson's call for multiple journal manuscript submissions, and consistent with Cicchetti (1991a and 1991b), counterarguments are presented. The policy for multiple submissions is difficult to defend scientifically ana would place an unwarranted burden on both reviewers and journal editors. As such the policy is again rejected. R2 As earlier hypothesized, referee agreement on manuscripts submitted to a major journal in chemistry was significantly higher for acceptance than for rejection. This is consistent with the high (...) acceptance rate (>70%) of this journal. There is significantly more referee agreement on rejection than on acceptance for manuscripts submitted to major journals, in behavioral science and medicine. These journals have high rejection rates (often >70%). (shrink)

In 2013 the Health Research Council of New Zealand began a stream of funding titled 'Explorer Grants', and in 2017 changes were introduced to the funding mechanisms of the Volkswagen Foundation 'Experiment!' and the New Zealand Science for Technological Innovation challenge 'Seed Projects'. All three funding streams aim at encouraging novel scientific ideas, and all now employ random selection by lottery as part of the grant selection process. The idea of funding science by lottery has emerged independently in several corners (...) of academia, including in philosophy of science. This paper reviews the conceptual and institutional landscape in which this policy proposal emerged, how different academic fields presented and supported arguments for the proposal, and how these have been reflected in actual policy. The paper presents an analytical synthesis of the arguments presented to date, notes how they support each other and shape policy recommendations in various ways, and where competing arguments highlight need for further analysis or more data. In addition, it provides lessons for how philosophers of science can engage in shaping science policy, and in particular highlights the importance of mixing complementary expertise: it takes a village to raise policy. (shrink)

This paper reviews the published empirical evidence concerning journal peer review consisting of 68 papers, all but three published since 1975. Peer review improves quality, but its use to screen papers has met with limited success. Current procedures to assure quality and fairness seem to discourage scientific advancement, especially important innovations, because findings that conflict with current beliefs are often judged to have defects. Editors can use procedures to encourage the publication of papers with innovative findings such as invited papers, (...) early-acceptance procedures, author nominations of reviewers, structured rating sheets, open peer review, results-blind review, and, in particular, electronic publication. Some journals are currently using these procedures. The basic principle behind the proposals is to change the decision from whether to publish a paper to how to publish it. (shrink)

BackgroundVast sums are distributed based on grant peer review, but studies show that interrater reliability is often low. In this study, we tested the effect of receiving two short individual feedback reports compared to one short general feedback report on the agreement between reviewers.MethodsA total of 42 reviewers at the Norwegian Foundation Dam were randomly assigned to receive either a general feedback report or an individual feedback report. The general feedback group received one report before the start of the reviews (...) that contained general information about the previous call in which the reviewers participated. In the individual feedback group, the reviewers received two reports, one before the review period and one during the period. In the individual feedback group, the reviewers were presented with detailed information on their scoring compared with the review committee as a whole, both before and during the review period. The main outcomes were the proportion of agreement in the eligibility assessment and the average difference in scores between pairs of reviewers assessing the same proposal. The outcomes were measured in 2017 and after the feedback was provided in 2018.ResultsA total of 2398 paired reviews were included in the analysis. There was a significant difference between the two groups in the proportion of absolute agreement on whether the proposal was eligible for the funding programme, with the general feedback group demonstrating a higher rate of agreement. There was no difference between the two groups in terms of the average score difference. However, the agreement regarding the proposal score remained critically low for both groups.ConclusionsWe did not observe changes in proposal score agreement between 2017 and 2018 in reviewers receiving different feedback. The low levels of agreement remain a major concern in grant peer review, and research to identify contributing factors as well as the development and testing of interventions to increase agreement rates are still needed.Trial registrationThe study was preregistered at OSF.io/n4fq3. (shrink)

Peer review is a topic of considerable concern to many researchers, and there is a correspondingly large body of research on the topic. This issue of Science and Engineering Ethics presents recent work on peer review that is both grounded in empirical science and is applicable to policy decisions. This research raises two basic questions; (a) how does current peer review operate, and (b) how can it be improved? Topics addressed include descriptions of how peer review is used in Federal (...) agencies. whether peer review leads to better manuscripts, demographic characteristics of authors or reviewers (status or institutional affiliation), blinding of reviewers, authors, or results, reliability and consistency of reviews, accepting a paper before the study is done, simultaneous submission, and use of dispute resolution procedures such as scientific dialectical and pleading protocols. (shrink)

This paper presents a framework that editors, peer reviewers, and authors can use to identify and resolve efficiently disputes that arise during peer review in scientific journals. The framework is called a scientific dialectical brief. In this framework, differences among authors and reviewers are formatted into specific assertions and the support each party provides for its position. A literature review suggests that scientists use five main types of support; empirical data, reasoning, speculation, feelings, and status. It is suggested that the (...) scientific dialectical brief format can streamline the review process by facilitating rapid differentiation between stronger and weaker support, so that valuable time can be focused on the better-substantiated claims. The paper concludes with some suggestions for implementation. (shrink)

Peer review poses many challenges for journals. A downside of high rejection rates and sometimes delayed responses in publication decision by journals is a long time period between original submission of a manuscript and its ultimate acceptance and publication. One way of accelerating the process which might be worth considering is multiple submission. This commentary addresses that issue.

A growing body of literature has identified potential problems that can compromise the quality, fairness, and integrity of journal peer review, including inadequate review, inconsistent reviewer reports, reviewer biases, and ethical transgressions by reviewers. We examine the evidence concerning these problems and discuss proposed reforms, including double-blind and open review. Regardless of the outcome of additional research or attempts at reforming the system, it is clear that editors are the linchpin of peer review, since they make decisions that have a (...) significant impact on the process and its outcome. We consider some of the steps editors should take to promote quality, fairness and integrity in different stages of the peer review process and make some recommendations for editorial conduct and decision-making. (shrink)

Peer reviews of 84 organic farming grant applications from Sweden were analyzed to determine whether the reviewers’ affiliation to one of two types of agriculture (i.e., organic and conventional) influenced their reviews. Fifteen reviewers were divided into three groups: (1) scientists with experience in organic farming research; (2) scientists with no experience in organic farming research; and (3) users of organic farming research. The two groups of scientists assessed the societal relevance and scientific quality of the grant applications based on (...) three criteria (i.e., presentation, methodology, qualifications), whereas the user group only assessed societal relevance. The analysis showed that the two groups of scientists provided very different reviews. Scientist reviewers with experience in organic farming research agreed more with the user group on research relevance than did scientist reviewers without such experience, and the assessment of relevance was closely correlated to the assessment of scientific quality within both scientific groups. As both scientific groups did not clearly distinguish between societal relevance and scientific quality, the idea of an objective science is challenged. The contextual values associated with the norms of good agriculture were not clearly distinguished from the constitutive values of science associated with the traditional norms of good science. This raises the question of whether organic and conventional grant applications should be mixed for review regardless of the reviewers. (shrink)

Born in the 17th century, journal peer review is an extremely diverse technology, constantly torn between two often incompatible goals: the validation of manuscripts conceived as a collective industrial-like reproducible process performed to assert scientific statements, and the dissemination of articles considered as a means to spur scientific discussion, raising controversies, and civically challenging a state of knowledge. Such a situation is particularly conducive to clarifying the processes of valuation and evaluation in journal peer review. In this article, such processes (...) are considered as specific tests in order to emphasize the uncertain properties of pre-tests manuscripts. On the one hand, evaluation tests are examined at the core of the validation of manuscripts, such as defining the coordination of judging instances or controlling the modalities of inter-knowledge between reviewers and authors. They are also studied regarding the dissemination of articles, notably through the contemporary conception of a continuing evaluation test termed “post publication peer review”. On the other hand, valuation tests are both part of the validation of manuscripts, such as the weighting of different judgments of the same manuscript and the tensions that these hierarchies cause, and of the dissemination of articles, such as attention metrics recording the uses of articles. The conclusion sketches out how the articulation of these different tests has recently empowered readers as a new key judging instance for dissemination and for validation, potentially transforming the definition of peers, and thus the whole process of journal peer review. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the rapid and unexpected rise of deep learning within Artificial Intelligence and its applications. It tackles the possible reasons for this remarkable success, providing candidate paths towards a satisfactory explanation of why it works so well, at least in some domains. A historical account is given for the ups and downs, which have characterized neural networks research and its evolution from “shallow” to “deep” learning architectures. A precise account of “success” is given, in order to sieve out (...) aspects pertaining to marketing or sociology of research, and the remaining aspects seem to certify a genuine value of deep learning, calling for explanation. The alleged two main propelling factors for deep learning, namely computing hardware performance and neuroscience findings, are scrutinized, and evaluated as relevant but insufficient for a comprehensive explanation. We review various attempts that have been made to provide mathematical foundations able to justify the efficiency of deep learning, and we deem this is the most promising road to follow, even if the current achievements are too scattered and relevant for very limited classes of deep neural models. The authors’ take is that most of what can explain the very nature of why deep learning works at all and even very well across so many domains of application is still to be understood and further research, which addresses the theoretical foundation of artificial learning, is still very much needed. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to use ethical arguments to strengthen the relationship between the concepts of legitimacy and evaluation. The analysis is based on the ethics of Levinas and Buber and is motivated by a sense of responsibility using dialogical ideology as a mediator. The main questions in this study consider the following: Does caring science as an independent academic discipline have the moral responsibility to develop a theory for evaluating the quality of basic research? and Will such (...) a quality evaluation theory have a reasonable probability of introducing legitimization into caring science? On an ethical level, this study introduces a meaningful interaction inspired by social demands and is linked to the concept of research justification. Legitimization turns from an abstract idea to an achievable entity by an act. The act of evaluation has the likelihood of delegating legitimacy and empowers the foundation of caring science, which in turn will become a cornerstone of nursing. At this stage there is no intention to develop an evaluation theory, rather to create a meaningful discussion for the future development of an ethics-based theory. (shrink)

An empirically sensitive formulation of the norms of transformative criticism must recognize that even public and shared standards of evaluation can be implemented in ways that unintentionally perpetuate and reproduce forms of social bias that are epistemically detrimental. Helen Longino’s theory can explain and redress such social bias by treating peer evaluations as hypotheses based on data and by requiring a kind of perspectival diversity that bears, not on the content of the community’s knowledge claims, but on the beliefs and (...) norms of the culture of the knowledge community itself. To illustrate how socializing cognition can bias evaluations, we focus on peer-review practices, with some discussion of peer-review practices in philosophy. Data include responses to surveys by editors from general philosophy journals, as well as analyses of reviews and editorial decisions for the 2007 Cognitive Science Society Conference. (shrink)

Psychometrically oriented researchers construe low inter-rater reliability measures for expert peer reviewers as damning for the practice of peer review. I argue that this perspective overlooks different forms of normatively appropriate disagreement among reviewers. Of special interest are Kuhnian questions about the extent to which variance in reviewer ratings can be accounted for by normatively appropriate disagreements about how to interpret and apply evaluative criteria within disciplines during times of normal science. Until these empirical-cum-philosophical analyses are done, it will remain (...) unclear the extent to which low inter-rater reliability measures represent reasonable disagreement rather than arbitrary differences between reviewers. (shrink)

The principles and practices of research peer review are described. While the principles are fundamentally generic and apply to peer review across the full spectrum of performing institutions as well as to manuscript/proposal/program peer review, the focus of this paper is peer review of proposed and ongoing programs in federal agencies. The paper describes desireable characteristics and important intangible factors in successful peer review. Also presented is a heuristic protocol for the conduct of successful peer review research evaluations and impact (...) assessments. Problems with peer review are then outlined, followed by examples of peer review of proposed and existing programs in selected federal agencies. Some peer review variants, such as the Science Court, are described, and then research requirements to improve peer review are discussed. (shrink)

The operative nucleus of peer review processes has largely remained a ‘black box’ to analytical empirical research. There is a lack of direct insights into the communicative machinery of peer review, i.e., into ‘gatekeeping in action’. This article attempts to fill a small part of this huge research gap. It is based on an ethnographic case study about peer review communication in a sociological journal. It looks at the final phase of the peer review process: the decisions taken in the (...) oral communication of editors’ meetings. The article describes this meeting as an instrumented talk, supported by written tools and constrained by necessary procedural outcomes. It analyzes examples of interactive negotiations of manuscripts and, in the end, it discusses the procedural rationality of peer review as a public sphere for professional judgment. (shrink)

The pace of scientific progress may be hindered by the tendency of our academic institutions to reward being popular rather than being right. A market-based alternative, where scientists can more formally 'stake their reputation', is presented here. It offers clear incentives to be careful and honest while contributing to a visible, self-consistent consensus on controversial scientific questions. In addition, it allows patrons to choose questions to be researched without choosing people or methods. The bulk of this paper is spent in (...) examining potential problems with the proposed approach. After this examination, the idea still seems to be plausible and worthy of further study. (shrink)

The relevance of Fuller's version of social epistemology to argumentation theory is highlighted, in response to critics who claim that I am not sufficiently critical of the social grounds of knowledge production. Responding to Lyne, I first consider the strengths and weaknesses of relying on economic images to capture the social. Then, I tackle two contrary objections: Brian Baigrie claims social epistemology is “not social enough,” while Angelo Corlett wonders whether it may be “too social.” Finally, I counter Malcolm Ashmore, (...) who argues that social epistemology is not sensitive to reflexive implications of its own doctrines. I conclude that a rhetoric needs to be forged that enables those wishing to transform knowledge production to make their case plausibly to those whose behavior needs to be changed most. At the moment, science critics preach to the converted, a fate that the social epistemologist should not wish to share. (shrink)

There are now several proposals for introducing random elements into the process of funding allocation for research, and some initial implementation of this policy by funding bodies. The proposals have been supported on efficiency grounds, with models, including social epistemology models, showing random allocation could increase the generation of significant truths in a community of scientists when compared to funding by peer review. The models in the literature are, however, fairly abstract. This paper introduces some of the considerations that are (...) required to build on the modelling work towards a fully-fledged policy proposal, including issues of cost and fairness. (shrink)